Cheese Trekking - by Trevor Warmedahl (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

"Cheese Trekking is an important book about food sovereignty, and it is a pleasure to read. Trevor Warmedahl's stories offer profound lessons about cheesemaking and life. His reflections flow with a certain poetry, featuring vivid, expressive descriptions of places, people, and animals and the unique flavors, textures, smells, and qualities of different cheeses and dairy concoctions. This book places cheesemaking within the broader context of place-based subsistence, where cheese, the animals whose milk it is made from, and the plants and land they graze upon are all elements of an elaborately orchestrated web of cultural and biological relationships. I love this book!"
--Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation

"In this anarcho-pastoralist masterpiece, Trevor Warmedahl looks to the old shepherds and cheesemakers for hope--on how to save our cheese, but also our humanity. A wisdom-filled window into alternative dimensions of cheesemaking, this book builds reverence for the sanctity of milk and will help us reclaim our greatest food: natural cheese."
--David Asher, author of Milk Into Cheese and The Art of Natural Cheesemaking

"Cheese Trekking provides a powerful new lens through which to view our world--one that will give you a new way of thinking about people, animals, and food."
--Dan Saladino, author of Eating to Extinction

"With Cheese Trekking, Trevor has penned what may be the most poetic, touching, and world-expanding treatise on fermentation and symbiosis to have ever been put to the page. This book will change not only how you think about cheese--and the humans, microbes, and animals that cocreate it--but also how you think about life. Anyone who cares about where their food comes from needs to read this book."
--David Zilber, chef and food scientist; coauthor of The Noma Guide to Fermentation

"Trevor Warmedahl's book is brimming with hard-earned knowledge about locally crafted cheeses and pastoral traditions. I've never come across a book that is part adventure travelogue, part methods manual, and part record of ancient foodways while at the same time a wise treatise on how to see our place on this Earth and how to live well. An important and timeless book."
--Helen Whybrow, author of The Salt Stones

"Trevor Warmedahl is the Jack Kerouac of cheese, sharing his renegade passion for the unprocessed and unpasteurized as he treks around the dairy-sphere--often staying in yurts, on couches, and under the stars--to learn about traditional cheesemaking. For years, I followed his zigzag trail via Instagram, awestruck by his observations and images, always curious to know more. Now, his book brings us fully into his journey, his poetic musings, and his ongoing questions about the future of milk, microbes, and humanity itself.
"If it's possible to write a cheese book that a reader cannot put down, Trevor Warmedahl has done it! What an inspiring, intrepid, exhilarating book."
--Tenaya Darlington, author of Madame Fromage's Adventures in Cheese

"In this book of remembering, Trevor Warmedahl explores the edges of our world, far beyond the heart of capitalism's sanitized reach, for the traces of people and practices that are the link to our collective past and to what makes us human. Trevor takes us to places where the people's contract with the wild is still intact, and where the sacred link between people, their animals, and the land measures in centuries and millennia. This book is an awakening, a journey to the heart of something, and a reminder that if you travel just a little bit further and hunger a little more deeply, you will find humanity out there on the fringes, where it has been all along. I love this book."
--Mateo Kehler, Jasper Hill Farm

"Cheese Trekking is a remarkable book by a remarkable man who set out to find traditional cheesemaking cultures all over the world and discovered culinary treasures in the process. Nobody interested in local food should miss it."
--Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, author of Hoofprints on the Land; founder, League for Pastoral Peoples

"Trevor Warmedahl is part tour guide, philosopher, naturalist, cheesemaker, activist, ecologist, and food guru. I've been lucky enough to follow his extraordinary travels over the last decade. Here at last he's gathered his thoughts in a gorgeously composed book about the entangled lives of animals, humans, and landscapes. In his tale of pastoralist people the world over, he offers us sober hope and strategies for a way out of our present dystopia. Pointed, impassioned, and at times hilarious, this book has taught me so much. A must-read for anyone interested in food and culture and surviving on a burning planet."
--Brad Kessler, author of Goat Song and North

"Trevor Warmedahl's extraordinary travelogue shows that the future of cheese is not about preserving traditions in aspic, but about drawing from them, learning how microbes, farming practices, and the environment once worked together to create distinctive flavors. Cheese Trekking makes a powerful case for rebuilding terroir and embracing microbial diversity to shape cheese cultures that are at once rooted and new."
--Bronwen and Francis Percival, authors of Reinventing the Wheel

"Grounded in his travels across mountains and dairies, Trevor Warmedahl's book shines a light on practices long relegated to the margins, asking us to rethink the ingredients and ways used to craft good cheese. It expands our sense of where wisdom in food comes from, reaching far beyond the usual cultural references. At once an engaging journey and a provocative reflection, it further opens space for natural cheesemaking techniques to be readopted. Like Trevor's journeys documented on social media, this book deepens, expands, and unsettles our understanding of cheese--and transforms the way we taste the world."
--Carlos Yescas, food advocate; social enterprise consultant

"Trevor traces the history of cheesemaking--and our relationship with herds and traditions--through vivid stories of remote dairies and shepherds. He shows how food reflects who we are and who we might become and inspires us to imagine a society where our connection to food is guided by health and meaning rather than price, profit, and convenience."
--Martin Rosberg, natural cheese educator and advisor

About the Author

Trevor Warmedahl has a well-established identity as a nomadic cheesemaker and is knowledgeable about grazing practices and milk fermentation globally. He's been a cheesemaker for the past decade working with companies of various sizes, but with a dedicated focus on farmstead operations and natural/raw milk. His interest is in what he describes as "endangered cheeses and milk fermentation practices of rural pastoral communities, the global diversity of these foods, and their ties to regional cultures and agricultural systems." Trevor won the 2022 Daphne Zepos Teaching Award for cheese professionals hoping to further their paths and bring home to North America valuable knowledge to benefit cheesemakers. His current project, The Sour Milk School, offers five-day natural cheesemaking workshops held on farms in the US and abroad.