Trevor Warmedahl Author Talk • Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir

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.

Cheese Trekking — 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.