Fermented Dairy Vitamin K

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The Other White Meat: Rediscovering The Health Benefits Of Traditional Cheese And Fermented Dairy

In 1987, a Nebraskan advertising agency crafted the clever tagline and campaign, “Pork: The Other White Meat,”¹ to help the National Pork Board promote pork products. It was the third most influential ad campaign for food in U.S. history. But even more successful was “Got milk?”—considered by many “one of the greatest ad campaigns of all time.”²

In this article, we are being a bit playful in rebranding cheese as “the other white meat,” but the fact is that our work and research with dairy—including extensive travel and time spent living with indigenous groups—has taught us the power of traditional cheese and other forms of fermented dairy. We try to ap­ply what we’ve learned at Modern Stone Age Kitchen (modernstoneage.com), our sourdough bakery, scratch-made restaurant and coffee shop in Chestertown, Maryland. We opened the restaurant—coming from former careers as an archaeology professor (Bill) and educator (Christina), and with no prior business experi­ence—to dedicate ourselves to ancestral cook­ing techniques and real food.

BILL: FROM ROCKS TO FOOD

As an experimental archaeologist, my (Bill’s) training and specialty is in prehistoric technologies such as stone tools, pottery and tanned hides. To learn how to make stone tools proficiently, you have to practice every day, so for years, I spent at least one hour a day liter­ally banging rocks in our garage. When our three children were all under five, Christina made the not-unreasonable request that I find a way to rechannel my passion for stone tools into something that would be more relevant to our family. After reflecting for some days, I suddenly had a “light bulb” realization: almost every single prehistoric technology in the entire world had something to do with getting, process­ing, storing, sharing or redistributing food. From a human biology and evolutionary standpoint, stone tools were game-changers.

We humans think of ourselves as being at the top of the food chain, and we are—but it’s not because of our nails or eyesight or muscles. We don’t have claws to dig tubers, strong teeth to crack nuts or rip carcasses apart, the ability to fly to reach things that are up high, or the speed and strength to jump on animals. How­ever, we have invented tools that have allowed us to overcome our physical limitations. Every single hunter-gatherer group had some version of a digging stick to get tubers out of the ground. Early humans invented ladders and climbing devices to get honey and eggs out of trees, and for hunting, they came up with bows and ar­rows, atlatls, boomerangs and throwing sticks. The earliest stone tools were sharper and more durable than the canine teeth of any animal. These technologies turned out to be the basis of every traditional food system in the world.

I also came to a second and equally im­portant realization: for almost every food that humans consume, we need to do something to make the food safe and make the nutrients bioavailable. Humans, for example, don’t have a rumen (referred to by some as a “fermenta­tion vat”³), or teeth that can break down tough vegetable materials like cows do when they chew. However, humans have figured out how to replicate what ruminants do by developing methods of fermentation. Those two realizations are what led our family to start making cheese and other dairy ferments.

DIGESTIBLE DAIRY

A lot of factors shape people’s feelings about what they should be eating, including their perspectives on traditional food. Some people say, “I’m only going to eat the things that humans are designed to eat,” but that ap­proach is problematic. Strictly speaking, there are only three things on this planet that are there for the express purpose of being consumed by something else: milk, honey and fruit (and only ripe fruit, at that).

We know that humans have had some sort of relationship to bovine milk for at least forty-nine-thousand years, because scientists have determined that red ochre (a natural pigment used throughout prehistory for cave paintings) used milk as a binder.⁴ We also know that hu­man infants (and other mammals) are perfectly designed to digest dairy. Mother’s milk is at body temperature, and it is teeming with live bacteria that thrive at that temperature. The moment the milk passes into the baby, the milk starts fermenting, and the baby starts produc­ing different enzymes that turn the milk into the most nutrient-dense, bioavailable food on the planet. These enzymes include lipase (to break down the fat), lactase (to break down milk sugar) and, when the milk makes it into the baby’s stomach, protease, which “denatures” the proteins (meaning takes the proteins out of their natural state), coagulating the milk to slow it down in the digestive tract. Nature has figured out that if the milk coagulates and turns into a jello-like substance, it will ferment longer and take longer to chemically and physically break down, meaning that when it goes into the small intestine, it is in the right state for the nutrients to be properly absorbed.

Fascinatingly, however, every single mam­mal on this planet, as soon as it gets weaned off of its mother, loses the ability to produce those enzymes in the same way. This fact has prompted some people to question whether we should be consuming dairy as adults. To ponder that question, consider how gut-brain expert Steven Gundry describes the digestive tract.⁵ He says that when you put food in your mouth, you’re putting it into something analogous to the Lincoln Tunnel. The only thing you can guaran­tee is that eventually it will come out the other end, but in order for you to get the nourishment that you need, your gut has to be healthy, and the food has to be broken down properly.

The reality is that adult digestion of dairy is not the same as infant digestion. Health officials estimate that roughly 68 percent of the global population has lactose malabsorption.⁶ Even if you are lactose-tolerant, you still do not have the mechanisms in your digestive tract that allowed you to fully digest milk as an infant. [Editor’s note: Studies of lactose intolerance generally ignore the distinction between pasteurized (or ultrapasteurized) milk and raw milk. Some surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that people with “lactose intolerance” often do fine when consuming raw milk.⁷] Does this mean that adults shouldn’t drink milk? Absolutely not! It doesn’t mean that we should avoid grains either. What it does mean is that we want to replicate natural biological processes to make dairy and grains as safe and nourishing as they can possibly be.

Raw milk is a truly great food, but as adults, if we want to maximize its nutritional value and the benefits of dairy in our diet, then it makes sense to replicate the process that our bodies went through as infants through fermentation. Whether in the form of cheese, kefir or yogurt, fermented dairy is easy to digest, nutrient-dense, bioavailable, loaded with probiotics, low-carb and, depending on the duration of fermenta­tion, either low-lactose or lactose-free. At a time when the “snack food” market is exploding with unhealthy choices, cheese and fermented dairy also make for healthy, satiating snacks, particularly great for calcium utilization and bone health.

TRAVELS WITH CHEESE

In our research and travels, we have ex­tensively studied traditional cheesemaking, because we wanted to make sure that we were making our own cheeses in a proper way. This has led us to witness and taste some fascinating cheeses. Places where we have sampled interest­ing cheeses include Nairobi, Kenya; Georgia in eastern Europe; Sicily, where they make delicious caciocavallo⁸ (a stretched-curd cow’s milk cheese considered one of the most ancient cheeses ever made in the Mediterranean); and Germany, where a cheese called Milbenkäse has the nickname “mite cheese” in honor of the mite-excreted digestive enzymes that cause the cheese to ripen. There, we even met Helmut Pöschel, a retired biology teacher who is the last remaining commercial maker of Milbenkäse and who also created a one-room Milbenkäse Mu­seum.⁹ “Mite cheese” is traditionally consumed with buttered rye bread and beer.

Another example of an insect-facilitated cheese is the Sardinian pecorino (sheep’s milk cheese) called casu marzu (“rotten cheese”). In 2009, the Guinness Book of World Records called it “the most dangerous cheese” in the world, and because of this dramatic reputation, it is banned for commercial sale in Italy and several other countries, including the U.S.¹⁰ (To us, the most dangerous cheese in the world is Velveeta!) The reason food authorities rate it as “dangerous” is because of the involvement of maggots. When Sardinian cheesemakers cut the curds and press the cheese into a wheel, they make little divots on the top to introduce special cheese skipper flies (Piophila casei) that lay eggs in the divots. Most cheesemakers want to keep bugs away, but the Sardinian cheese­makers invite them in. When the eggs hatch, they turn into maggots, and the maggots crawl through and digest the cheese, transforming it into something soft and creamy with a unique texture and flavor—what CNN described in 2025 as “intense with reminders of the Mediter­ranean pastures and spicy with an aftertaste that stays for hours.”¹¹ You are actually supposed to eat the cheese when the maggots are still alive and crawling through it, because that means you can be confident that the cheese is still good. (Because of the commercial ban, casu marzu has become a bit like moonshine in West Virginia, something made in the back hills.)

When it comes to learning how to replicate natural biological processes so that adults can safely and efficiently get incredible nutrition from one of nature’s most perfect foods, we can learn from another Sardinian cheese called callu de cabrettu,¹² which comes from the stomach lining of young goats and is made in the epicenter of the original Sardinian “Blue Zone”—the first so-called Blue Zone (places characterized by exceptional longev­ity) ever identified. (Note that we have visited multiple Blue Zones, and the information often disseminated about their “plant-based” diet is 100 percent false. They are not eating minestrone soup! When we were in Sardinia, where longevity was very evident, the amount of animal foods eaten on a regular basis was “mind-blowing,” and everything we ate was harvested, slaughtered, butchered and made from scratch by the people or their relatives sitting around the table.)

In the mountainous Sardinian village we visited, the shepherds make callu de cabrettu by taking an unweaned goat and bringing it to its mother. After it fills its stomach with milk, they harvest the goat, pull the stomach out and hang it up for ten days, letting the stomach acids convert the milk to cheese.¹³ Ten days later, they eat the cheese. Now, think about what happened. First, the goat was unweaned, so it was still creating all the needed enzymes—the lipase, lactase and the chymosin (a component of rennet) that coagulates the milk. Second, the milk was completely raw; it came out of the mother goat at body temperature and went into the young goat’s stomach, enabling all of those chemical reac­tions to occur. Third, the shepherds gave it the right amount of time to ferment. We would add that it was a very sacred process characterized by deep respect for the animal, and they used every part of the animal, nose to tail.

REPLICATING THE NATURAL DIGESTIVE PROCESS

As our Sardinian travels confirmed, every infant mammal makes cheese in its stomach. It’s part of the natural digestive process. The simple process that we observed illustrates that, as cheesemakers, we are simply trying to replicate that digestive process outside of the body. This involves a few basic steps:

1. The first step is to make sure the milk is at body temperature. If you are milking your animals directly, the process starts automatically, but for the majority who don’t have animals and are starting with refrigerated milk, you will be warming it to one hundred degrees.
2. The second step is to make sure that fermentation happens. If you are using very fresh raw milk (less than two days old), you can rely on the bacteria naturally present in the milk to control the fermenta­tion. However, if you have raw milk that is more than two days old or pasteurized milk, you will need to inoculate it with some sort of bacteria. (If you have to use pasteurized milk, the only milk that will set is low-temperature, vat-pasteurized and non-homogenized milk.)
3. When the curd is set, you will cut the curd and take out the whey. Then, by controlling the variables of temperature, hydration, humidity and aging time, you can make different kinds of cheeses.

Fresh raw milk naturally contains the bacteria needed to make every cheese in the world—except for blue cheese. (If you want to make blue cheese without buying a culture, you can take a high-quality sourdough bread, let it mold and use the mold.) In addition, the lipase naturally present in raw milk provides the ser­vice of breaking down the fats properly, while Lactobacillus bacteria eat the lactose as food. Over time, as the lactobacilli eat more lactose, the pH goes down (that is, becomes more acidic), which is necessary in all cheesemaking.

The lower the pH, the less lactose remains. A fully fermented dairy product is a lactose-free product. Consider Mongolia: out on the steppes, dairy from camels or yaks is part of the daily diet—but nobody drinks milk. They have almost 100 percent lactose intolerance, but it’s a non-issue because they ferment the milk.

FERMENTATION CULTURES

One of the things you need to do when you are fermenting dairy is to match up the bacteria that work best at different temperatures with the type of fermentation that you are doing. You can think about one hundred degrees (body temperature) as a sort of dividing line. Although it is the ideal temperature for Lactobacillus bac­teria to produce fermentation, there is a range below one hundred degrees, and a range above it, where certain bacteria will still work. From about one hundred to one hundred thirty-five degrees is “thermophilic” (“hot”) fermentation. From about one hundred degrees down to about sixty-eight degrees is “mesophilic” fermenta­tion. Kefir, left to ferment on your countertop, is an example of mesophilic fermentation.

Some fermentations can happen in either one of these two ranges. For example, you may be familiar with thermophilic yogurt, where you have to hold the yogurt at a constant temperature for a certain number of hours, but you can also make a mesophilic yogurt at room temperature. All you have to do is stir the culture into the milk and sit it on the counter overnight. In Kenya, a traditional “ash yogurt” called mursik¹⁴ is fer­mented in a smoked gourd for anywhere from three days to three months at room temperature.

Raw milk that spends more than two days in the refrigerator is a different food than when it first goes in. It’s not bad to drink, but the vi­tality and even the community of microbes in that milk will be different after several days in the refrigerator. If you are making something requiring bacterial fermentation, and you are using raw milk more than two days old, you will need to introduce some kind of culture—for example, clabber, kefir, a freeze-dried culture, yogurt or buttermilk—to ensure fermentation. Even if you have the best raw milk, the lacto­bacilli that are perfectly designed to operate at one hundred degrees will go almost completely dormant after more than a couple of days.

If you have access to fresh, high-quality raw milk that has never been cooled down—that is, it is still warm from the animal—one of the best things you can do is let some of that milk sit on the counter overnight to make clabber, a type of naturally thickened, soured milk that makes a supercharged dairy culture. By the next day, it will contain plentiful good bacteria ready to perform all sorts of work. Even when traditional cheesemakers ferment raw milk taken directly from the animal, many will also keep a clabber culture going by feeding milk with a little bit of the clabber culture. You can keep it going like a yogurt culture. If you have week-old milk in your refrigerator, you can even put some of the clabber in it to reintroduce strong, beautiful bacteria.

If clabber is the number-one choice for a consistent and powerful culture, kefir is number two. You can use kefir to make every single cheese on the planet, as well as other ferments such as yogurt. If you are going to keep one dairy culture going in your house, let it be kefir.

As a third option, you can buy freeze-dried cultures from various Internet sources. For cheesemaking, this is not always ideal, in part because most companies are not providing the complete communities of bacteria—the heir­loom cultures—that have been living together for thousands of years. Instead, they cherry-pick a few. That is the downside, but the upside is that if you are new to cheesemaking, freeze-dried cultures can be a user-friendly way to give it a try. Fortunately, there are also a growing num­ber of businesses that offer heirloom cultures. In addition, you will need to order some rennet. (For a good source of natural liquid calf rennet and cheese cultures, we like thecheesemaker. com.) Rennet can stay in your refrigerator for about a year, and cheesemaking cultures will last about a year in the freezer.

Traditional cheesemaking took place in vessels made of wood or ceramic, or in animal skins, which allowed it to harbor incredible bacterial diversity. Because of this, cheesemak­ing got better over time. Unfortunately, at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, regulations don’t allow us to use anything that is permeable, so we have to use metal, plastic or glass.

VITAMIN K2

Weston Price talked about “activator X,” and thanks to people like Chris Masterjohn and Sally Fallon Morell, we now know that activator X is vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 is important for many reasons. It directs calcium to bones and teeth, it plays a synergistic role with vitamins A and D, it’s good for inflammation and it’s good for metabolism.

Although there are a small number of other food sources of vitamin K2, traditional fermented dairy—especially raw, full-fat, long-aged cheese¹⁵ and kefir¹⁶—remains one of the richest natural sources of vitamin K2 that our bodies can use. Fermentation, in some cases, quadruples the amount of K2 in the food. Grassfed cows will create a little bit of K2 in their bodies from the K1 that they’re eating, but it is fermentation that really gets K2 production going. In fact, K2 will even be produced dur­ing fermentation of milk from grain-fed cows where no K1 is present (although milk from grass-fed cows will generate larger amounts). We are not suggesting that people drink milk from grain-fed animals, but we are saying that this process is so powerful that it even happens when fermenting non-ideal milk. This also means that cultured butter made from cows that didn’t eat grass will have more K2 in it than sweet-cream butter made from grass-fed cows. The culturing process will produce much more K2 than is naturally present in the cream, even from amazing cows.

There are a lot of different forms of K2, and although there is usually only one form in the milk itself beforehand, bacterial fermentation in dairy produces most of the others. Impor­tantly, vitamin K2 is produced many times more through mesophilic versus thermophilic fermen­tation. If you are looking to fermented dairy as a source of K2, you should be making yogurt on your countertop and not in your Instapot. (We recommend the heirloom yogurt starter cultures from Cultures for Health [culturesforhealth.com].) In the Republic of Georgia (at one time home to one of the oldest living populations in the world), they make a mesophilic yogurt called matsoni.¹⁷ It is incredibly delicious, and a lot more nutritious than the thermophilic yogurt that most people make. (Cultures for Health has an heirloom matsoni culture.)

The longer the fermentation, the higher the production of K2, which is why aged cheeses are so rich in K2. This is also why we ferment the yogurt we make at Modern Stone Age Kitchen for a full twenty-four hours. The same holds true for kefir, which is typically a twenty-four-hour fermentation. And as already mentioned, a longer fermentation time also plummets the lactose. Notably, K2 production only happens in the presence of intact full-fat molecules, so it will not happen properly in homogenized milk.

CHEESE FOR ALL OCCASIONS AND PALATES

One of the huge benefits of cheese is the variety of flavors, textures and aromas, all of which depend on where you are getting your milk, from what type of animal and how the cheese is made. When we started making cheese and fermenting dairy in our family, we were also inter­ested in the economics of homemade cheese. (Think about the quantities of yogurt, cheese sticks, sandwich cheese and so on that a family of five is capable of consuming!) It’s very costly to buy a fresh burrata (billed as a more “luxurious” mozzarella), but much more affordable if you get the milk and make it yourself.

At the restaurant, our hands are tied in numerous ways (for example, we are not allowed to use raw milk, and we’re required to introduce a new culture with each batch), but what you can do in your own home is going to be a thousand times better than almost anything you can buy. In terms of making cheese at home, we have also found that it is very forgiv­ing—and it makes people happy. Sourdough breadmaking can sometimes be a bit challenging for beginners, but homemade cheese doesn’t have to be perfect and virtually always tastes good!

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SIDEBARS

TRADITIONAL RENNET

Bill learned a lot about cheesemaking from David Asher, a former farmer and author of The Art of Natural Cheese­making, who teaches people how to use in-house starter cultures and natural rennet from calves and goat kids. Asher was once asked for his opinion about vegetable (microbial) rennets. Those rennets will work, but Asher does not use them. The primary reason is because traditional rennets acknowledge a dairy industry reality, which is that male baby cows die. Farmers who make cheese keep the female babies so that they will have more milk (and be able to make more cheese), but they kill and eat the male calves. Because the calves are unweaned, the farmers can then use the animals’ stomachs to make rennet. This is the cycle. Denying this is just one more way that people end up disconnected from the reality of our food system.

A NOTE ABOUT VINEGAR

Fermentation involves chemical and physical changes that release nutrients and make food more digestible. When you use vinegar as a food preservation method, it shortcuts fermentation and produces something that is not as nourishing. A fermented pickle will always be much healthier than a vinegar-preserved pickle. The same holds true for cheesemaking.

Unfortunately, mozzarella and other stretch-curd cheeses are some of the most bastardized cheeses out there, at least in the U.S., because most of them use vinegar (or citric or lactic acid) as a shortcut to instantly drop the pH. This bypasses the incredibly valuable fermentation process, which should take from five to eight hours and allows the Lac­tobacillus bacteria to eat the lactose, create lactic acid and drop the pH more gradually. In a non-shortcut process, milk typically starts at a slightly acid pH of just below seven (perhaps 6.8), and it is not until the pH has fallen to 5.2, hours later, that you can stretch it and make your bowl of fresh mozzarella. Mozzarella made with vinegar is a completely different-tasting food that is not as healthy or nourishing. It is not a real cheese, and it is not even a real food! If you are lactose-intolerant, you might as well drink a glass of milk, because all the lactose is still there. Even restaurants that say they make their cheese “from scratch” often are simply buying ready-made curd in a package and stretching it in-house.

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REFERENCES

1. https://porkcheckoff.org/pork-branding/pork-brands/the-other-white-meat-brand/
2. Kauffman J. Why “Got milk?” is one of the great­est ad campaigns of all time. Saveur, Dec. 1, 2022. https://www.saveur.com/culture/got-milk-greatest-ad-campaign/
3. From feed to milk: understanding rumen function. PennState Extension, updated Aug. 1, 2016. https://extension.psu.edu/from-feed-to-milk-understand­ing-rumen-function
4. Fessenden M. In South Africa, people painted with cow milk long before they domesticated cattle. Smithsonian Magazine, Jul. 9, 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/south-africa-people-painted-milk-cattle-were-domesti­cated-180955852/
5. Steven Gundry: the king of gut health. Atlantic International University, n.d. https://www.aiu.edu/innovative/steven-gundry-the-king-of-gut-health/
6. Definition & facts for lactose intolerance. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, reviewed February 2018. https://www.ni­ddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-diseases/lactose-intolerance/definition-facts
7. Smith S. Raw milk and lactose intolerance. Raw Milk Institute, Feb. 5, 2024. https://www.raw­milkinstitute.org/updates/raw-milk-and-lactose-intolerance
8. The Sicilian caciocavallo, one of the most ancient cheese in the island. The Sicilian Cuisine Blog, Jan. 28, 2018. https://www.thesiciliancuisineblog.com/2018/01/28/the-sicilian-caciocavallo-one-of-the-most-ancient-cheese-in-the-island/
9. Edelbaum S. The biology teacher resurrecting Ger­many’s 500-year-old mite cheese. Atlas Obscura, Nov. 13, 2023. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/german-mite-cheese
10. https://www.britannica.com/topic/casu-marzu
11. Petroni A. Casu marzu: the world’s “most danger­ous” cheese. CNN, Feb. 7, 2025. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/casu-marzu-maggots-worlds-most-dangerous-cheese
12. Jessembadger. Callu de cabrettu. Atlas Obscura, n.d. https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/callu-de-cabrettu
13. Bailey N. The age-old method used to make callu de cabrettu cheese. Tasting Table, Nov. 12, 2022. https://www.tastingtable.com/1094291/the-age-old-method-used-to-make-callu-de-cabrettu-cheese/
14. Mursik recipe: Kenya’s smoked fermented milk (the Kalenjin warrior’s drink). Figaro Shakes, Mar. 9, 2026. https://figaroshakes.com/cultural-ferments/mursik-recipe-kenyas-smoked-fermented-milk-the-kalenjin-warriors-drink/
15. Vermeer C, Raes J, van ʼt Hoofd C, et al. Mena­quinone content of cheese. Nutrients. 2018 Apr 4;10(4):446.
16. Kresser C. Kefir: the not-quite-paleo superfood. Chris Kresser, Mar. 2, 2012. https://chriskresser.com/kefir-the-not-quite-paleo-superfood/comment-page-3/
17. https://www.yemoos.com/blogs/yemoos-blog/what-is-matsoni

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