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

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Few books begin with the author admitting that taking a job managing a Mongolian cheesemaking factory “was a bad move and the best decision I ever made.” Trevor Warmedahl, a self-d escribed nomadic cheesemaker, is drawn to such contradictions and they shape this account of his explorations. It was in Mongolia that he began turning away from the linear standards of industrial production toward what he calls more “permeable, wavy, and spherical” ways of thinking about cheese. He then set out to see what those ideas looked like in practice. The journey takes him to the Valley of the Yaks, to pastoral farms called seters in Norway, and to cheesemakers in Piemonte and Valle d’Aosta, as well as across Slovenia, Spain, Albania, Georgia, Austria, and India. His guiding conviction is that milk carries a terroir: shaped by plants, landscape, and livestock, and refined by the people who handle it. The herders and cheesemakers he meets along the way bring that conviction to life. Like the geologists in John McPhee’s writing, they are specific, vivid people through whom a larger world comes into focus. An uncommon story and an uncommonly good read.Hardcover. Show more