Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir

Exploring the intersection between traditional and modern, this is a no-holds-barred guide to natural cheesemaking, dairying, and pastoralism—and one man’s global quest to make milk Sacred again. In Cheese Trekking, nomadic cheesemaker, fermentation educator, and popular Substack writer Trevor Warmedahl recounts his experiences visiting pastoral communities and cheesemakers in overlooked border regions around the world, traveling on a shoestring budget with little more than a rucksack and sleeping bag. With every step, he explains how cheeses can be exquisite manifestations of locale and exposes the destructive methods and bland homogeneity of modern industrial production. In clear, propulsive language, Trevor describes a range of milk foods that utilize all byproducts of cheesemaking and are the lifeblood of the communities from which they spring. There is a growing international movement to return to the roots of natural cheesemaking, at the core of which is a philosophy of working with—rather than against—microbes and nature; the sacredness of motherhood, milk, and life itself; and the ethics involved in dairying. Trevor’s central premise is that milk has a terroir, born from the plants and ecology of a landscape, that is concentrated via ruminant digestion and lactation and develops through the barns and milk sheds—steered by human hands and cultural practices into foods. Throughout Cheese Trekking, Trevor offers firsthand evidence that humans can be stewards of landscapes, shepherds of microbes, and keepers of genetic wealth in the form of heritage livestock breeds, while crafting delicious, safe, nutrient-dense milk foods.  "Brimming with hard-earned knowledge . . . Part adventure travelogue, part methods manual, and part record of ancient foodways that is at the same time a wise treatise on how to see our place on this earth and how to live well."—Helen Whybrow, author of The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life