For Trevor Warmedahl, food and flavor are passions and ways to experience other cultures. Working in restaurants in Seattle led to his first cheese-making job and stoked an interest in learning more about the full cycle of cheesemaking. He then worked on small farmstead dairies in California and Colorado, and ultimately had an offer to work in a cheese factory in Mongolia. Though his mission there was to teach a European style of making cheese, his eyes were opened to a traditional pastoral foodway that roused his curiosity and launched a global journey to learn cheesemaking from the waning cultures of pastoral people in Asia and Europe. His forthcoming book, Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir, documents his extraordinary culinary journey.    

ARTY: In your global travels, sometimes you planned your trip and other times you say you took a leap of faith that someone would appear and help. There’s a quote in the book: “Sometimes losing the trail is the trail.” You must have been very resourceful to convince people in a variety of countries with different cultures and language barriers to accept you as an apprentice. What was your experience around all of that?

TREVOR: When I first started traveling, I did a trial run trip when I was in Mongolia and I went out and spent time in the countryside staying with families. That’s where this concept of “cheese-trekking” came from. It was quite easy in Mongolia because of the incredible sense of hospitality there. It was nothing out of the ordinary for people to welcome me into their homes and let me observe what they were doing.

And I found that to be the case with pastoral people around the world. There’s an underlying hospitality. It seems to be a trend. I’ve relied on that quite a bit.

Quite often I’m visiting places that are fairly remote and hard to get to, and there are not a lot of travelers visiting these regions, so there’s also not as much of the infrastructure in place for tourism. So, for me to just show up is a novelty and doors open for me. Walking up to some of these villages or shepherds’ camps, the first reaction was, “What do you want?” When they realized I wanted to hang out, people started feeding me. It hasn’t really been a problem.

I’ve mostly had good luck everywhere I’ve gone. At times, things were strange. I ran into a lot of heavy alcoholism and sometimes very rigid social norms around gender roles. There’s a dark side out there, but in general I’ve had really good experiences. And the more I’ve done this, the more I’ve built a résumé for it and more people start inviting me. It’s become easier to find cheese-makers to work with.

ARTY: There is another quote in the book that, to me, epitomizes your motivation for your trekking: “To see what remained of older, more practical approaches to making cheese that are not reliant on purchased inputs, to learn the techniques and recipes before they were buried in modernity’s rush, to slaughter everything slow and holy.”

TREVOR: That does sum up the drive that I had. First, It was the sense that something very meaningful was being lost, and that it’s really easy to get bogged down in the tragedy of that and to lament what’s being lost. I decided that the only way to adequately respond to what I was seeing was to go out and experience it while it was still there, and to see if there was anything I could do.

A lot of what’s being lost is being forced out. There’s a paradigm to making food that has been applied from the top down. We see it clearly in agriculture with patented crops and the reliance on fertilizers, the whole systems of industrial agriculture that’s been forced on country after country. The same thing has happened with dairy foods and with cheese. It’s epitomized by the starter cultures and the rennet that are being used. These products are made by a few transnational corporations, and they’re seen as what is modern and what is efficient and reliable.

My work pushes back against that and shows that people have been able to produce these things on their own or locally for a very long time with a very successful track record that I think can actually be safer and more reliable than these purchased inputs. I’m trying to tell the stories of the places where these old ways haven’t been eradicated, those places where people are resisting or who have been removed from wider economies for so long. But, there is a transition that’s happening and those old ways are fading.  

But over the course of  visiting these places with the imperative to see the traditional ways before they disappeared, my philosophy has become a lot more optimistic. I see that even though the old ways and the traditions are being eroded, new things are popping up that are very interesting, and the old ways live on in kind of unsuspecting ways and have a strange way of popping back up again.

ARTY: Mongolia was your first stop. You didn’t go there with the idea of  starting your journey of cheese-trekking. What did you learn and what did you unlearn in Mongolia?

TREVOR: I went to Mongolia to manage a cheese plant, more or less, in the same style of cheese-making that I was attempting to get away from, using commercial starter cultures, pasteurizing the milk, and making European style cheeses. But it struck me as being absurd to do that in a country that has vast traditions of making dairy foods.

I went there to do this job, but quickly became jaded and left. And that turned out to be the right thing to do. But Mongolia was where my vision of learning cheesemaking from pastoral people was born.

In Mongolia, I observed people raising huge herds of animals without fences or barns, which I did not understand. It didn’t make sense to me. Oftentimes in the U.S., when livestock get out of the fence, people freak out. If there are animals in the road, the animals freak out. It’s like a weird jailbreak. But in Mongolia, it was the opposite, people would fence in their house to keep the animals out rather than fencing them in. I learned that these people had a profound understanding of the behavior of the animals and that they were working with them; they were integrating themselves into the social structure of a flock or herd and allowing the animals to do what they do. They worked with the psychology of the animals in a completely different way that wasn’t about control. There wasn’t as much manipulation of the behavior of the animals even in their breeding and their genetics. Everything was more hands off.

I saw the same thing in how the cheeses were being made. There wasn’t a need to control what microbes are going in and doing the fermentation. There was a knowledge of how milk ferments. It was a very deep science, a folk science.

There is a romantic image that pastoral communities are just simple shepherds. But, what I encountered were highly intelligent people who were very good at a number of different skills from caring for animals, such as veterinary service, to butchering. They are also very skilled at hunting and fishing and even things like repairing automobiles, and making clothes and tents. They have a vast skillset. That really appealed to me as a different way of approaching knowledge  that, unfortunately, so much of which was being lost in the erosion of this lifestyle.

ARTY: One example of a practice that you came across in Mongolia and Italy, and maybe other places, that is quite different from a Western industrial process and which probably would horrify most Western people as highly unsanitary is the animal teats were never sterilized before milking.

TREVOR: Now it appears strange to me how standard the practice is in the U.S. Sterilizing the teats is done by large industrial producers that probably should be doing it, but even by people who have just a couple of goats. They’re told that they need to put iodine on the teats of the animals, either before and after milking or just after milking. The idea is that when you milk an animal, the orifice that the milk comes out of stays open for a while after milking, and the idea is that bacteria can get inside of it and potentially be problematic for the milk. The science on this is very much debated. I don’t think you really can sanitize something like a biological orifice of a cow. I don’t think it really works that way and I don’t know that you would want to.

I noticed that in so many other places, they weren’t doing this. At first I was concerned: “Won’t that result in bacteria being in the milk?” And people were like, “yes, of course, there’s supposed to be bacteria in milk.” There’s always going to be bacteria in milk, whether you kill it, or whether it’s good or bad, it’s going to be there. Milk is a breeding ground for bacteria. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be a very good thing. Milk should ferment into a sour milk state or into something that becomes cheese. This is what has been done with milk for the vast majority of human history.

Noticing that made me want to understand the science and microbiology. If you have healthy animals that are not either transmitting diseases internally from their bodies or spreading them amongst themselves, the bacteria that’s living on their teats and going into the milk could be generally okay. People have been drinking milk made like this for a very long time generally by fermenting it and by not refrigerating to prevent it from fermenting. The cultural practice is to encourage it to ferment in a safe and predictable way into something that’s healthy and delicious.

That way of doing things is very much rooted in biology. There is a community of microbes that lives on the body of an animal that we could either distrust and try to disrupt it, or we could work with it and try to actually allow it to flourish and allow it to be a part of the milk that’s becoming the cheese, and potentially making the cheese even more a product of the place where it’s from if it’s being fermented by the microbes that are wild or being semi-cultivated in the spaces where we make cheese.

ARTY: But taking that one practice and putting it into a Western industrial setting isn’t advisable. The microbiome of the animal is in relationship to the microbiome of the environment and of the people working with the animals. So, in the environments that you visited, there are interrelated microbial communities whose diversity is the basis for food safety by creating a balanced and healthy microbiome in the whole system. That is quite the opposite of the toxic environments of CAFOs (Concentrated  Animal Feeding Operations).

TREVOR: That’s correct, and that’s what’s been broken. It is hard to have these conversations because I’m talking about systems that have evolved in a place and with a certain level of economy, comparing  them to the opposite extreme of dairy farming in America. In those situations, the way large herds of dairy animals are being raised puts stress on the bodies of the cows who are being forced to produce as much milk as possible. It’s not a healthy situation. It’s a situation that is ripe with opportunity for the spread of pathogens and illnesses.

So you can see why things like pasteurization, rigorous sanitation with harsh chemicals, and things like iodine dips have become standard because when you have a broken system that encourages the spread of disease, you have to take all these measures. It’s similar to applying chemical fertilizers, plowing, and planting a mono crop, you end up with a lot of pests and other problems that you have to use more chemicals to take care of.

I’m not advocating that we just kind of leave all of those modern protocols behind, but I want to see where the middle ground is between some of these more extreme situations that I’ve seen and the mess that is modern industrial dairying.

ARTY: You observed another example in Italy of how pastoral folks live with and use the microbiome of their whole environment. Christian at La Cascina del Finocchio Verde made cheese in the same room that it was being aged. If I have this right, that’s not a typical Western practice. How does that affect the process?

TREVOR: Christian makes a cheese that’s ripened for a very short period of time. It’s a small sheep milk cheese made with raw milk and no additional starter culture. By aging the cheese in the same space, the theory that I’ve come up with is that the room itself was kind of being a carrier for the yeast that’s growing on the cheese. The cheese is ripened mainly by yeasts and a little bit of white mold. These were thriving in the air and on the walls and on the cheeses themselves. So it was like once the new fresh cheeses came out and were salted, they were, in a way, immediately inoculated with this beneficial rind microbiome. So the cheese room itself becomes a carrier of this culture. It was the first time I had experienced that.

I’ve found this to be true in many situations, even situations where people are attempting to sanitize all their equipment. I think that these microbes are very resilient, and that, despite all our attempts to eradicate life from a space like this, we fail. And this mentality that we should treat a creamery like it’s a hospital has about the same results as treating a hospital like a hospital – it hasn’t done us very much good to have this delusion that we can sterilize life out of a space. It’s fraught with peril.

ARTY: Let’s talk about something that I think is near and dear to your heart and near and dear to your work, and that’s what you refer to as deep terroir. You talk about the distillation of the land into milk and cream. Can you explain that? What are the influences that develop a distinctive terroir?

TREVOR: That ended up being a big quest in the book, trying to understand if terroir in cheese is possible the way it is in wine. When it does occur, how is it happening? What are the mechanisms or the vectors for a cheese having a very unique taste of place? That was what I was searching for.

When I first found what I now call deep terroir, it blew my mind. Deep terroir means there’s a direct aromatic link between a cheese and somewhere on the farm–a barn or a creamery–a place that has the taste of the cheese, and that was at La Cascina del Finocchio Verde, the spot we were talking about earlier with Christian. I went out in the field with him and I put my hands in the dirt, which was kind of muddy in October, and I smelled the soil and it smelled like rotting leaves, grass, fungus, and sheep. Then I went into the creamery and put my face close to one of the cheeses and smelled almost the exact same profile. It was different. It was modified, but there was a continuity. So that hit me in a really big way, where it was like, okay, terroir definitely is possible. I’m experiencing it right now, and this cheese is beautiful; it literally tastes like the field that it came from.

I’ve come up with about four types of terroir sources. The first would be the landscape itself, the place where the animals are being raised, the pastures and the water. It also relates to the climate and the soil.

Then there’s the livestock, who are the carrier of that terroir, who turn the landscape into milk. It is also  the breed and the type of fat and protein that that breed produces.

And then there’s the human culture, which is not only the recipes and the techniques for making the cheese, but also how they build the barns, how they farm, where they cut their hay, and what they do with the manure. Even the tools that are used to make the cheese, and the practices that are handed down through experiential transfer of knowledge, all these things are directly impacting the terroir of the cheese.

The fourth, the smallest fractal, would be microbes. All of the previous three are feeding into this microbial terroir, which are the microbes that are unique to a place or more likely a microbial community that’s unique to that place but made up of players that are found all over.

The microbial potential of raw milk is being steered by how humans are raising livestock in particular places into particular cheeses, oftentimes without an understanding that that’s what they were doing. That has led to cheeses that have these really unique tastes and aromas and textures. All of that makes up terroir, it’s a web of connections.

For me, terroir is a subjective feeling, it’s something that just kind of strikes me. I’m not going to try to define it any more than that because being in these places, eating the cheeses, and having the experiences that I’ve had has been the reward that I didn’t know I was seeking.

The industrial approach seems to be kind of the antithesis of terroir. If everyone’s using the same cultures, following the same kind of protocols, using the same equipment, then you’re eradicating the potential for unique communities of microbes to be thriving in these situations. You’re actually intentionally disrupting the flow of microbes from landscapes through milking barns into creameries and aging spaces.

ARTY: That’s the most comprehensive definition of terroir I’ve ever heard. In the book, you talk about the Western psyche, the feeling that people in the West do not quite feel at home on the planet, inherently predisposed to damage ecosystems. But in Italy, you saw grazing practices that actually nourished landscapes. In Norway, you saw grazing animals properly had created park-like conditions. Those are examples of foodways that can be immersed in functioning, healthy ecosystems.

TREVOR: Another angle that I’m always looking for is the potential of raising dairy livestock in a way that is ecologically beneficial rather than ecologically destructive. In some places, people are implementing these newer planned grazing programs Allan Savory-style, with a lot of electric fencing and regular moves, and pasture observation, and analysis and planning through those protocols. Those seem to work pretty well.

But what I’m interested in bringing to the conversation is places where it’s a little less planned and a little less controlled, where people are still moving animals on foot or horseback and are able to maintain ecological relationships in particular habitats and agricultural landscapes that have been built up over time involving livestock and maintained by these movements of herds and people. The main one that a lot of people are familiar with is transhumance, which is the movement of animals and people from a valley where they spend the winter, up to mountains in the summer where they have access to the alpine pastures, and their milk and cheese is made there. So quite often, those alpine pastures are actually being maintained by the fact that these animals are being brought up to graze.

In places where this tradition has been lost, you see forests encroaching on grasslands. That can be a negative thing.

What I’ve seen in places like Norway, Northern Italy, and Slovenia are these mosaic landscapes that include forests, meadows, and zones in between, with hedgerows or stone walls that create a unique habitat where plants and animals are seen that aren’t necessarily seen on either side of that line, or where a forest meets a meadow. Those places can be this very rich inter-exchange of biology, nutrients, etc.

The use of livestock tied in with other forms of agriculture, like orchards and growing crops can create landscapes that maximize the amount of these edges, creating more habitat for more animals, plants and microbes. That’s the ideal. I’ve seen it, but it’s been degraded in many places. But there is a resurgence happening. You see it especially in Europe where quite a few countries have now gotten UNESCO protection for transhumance and certain types of mountain farming and mobile pastoralism.

In the conversation around the impact of livestock on ecosystems and on the climate at large, I think there’s really important voices to be included from some of the countries that don’t get as much recognition.

Based on his extensive travels, Trevor shares his knowledge of traditional cheese making in The Sour Milk School typically held on a dairy farm. The 5-day workshops are a hands-on, immersive introduction to cheese-making from an alternative perspective.

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