Traditional Vs. Industrial Cheese: Does It Matter Where Your Cheese Comes From? With Trevor Warmedahl

Traditional cheesemakers respect the process of cheesemaking. They honor the environment, the animal, its milk and traditional techniques – all of which lead to delicious, nutritious cheese. Industrial cheesemaking, in stark contrast, emphasizes sterile conditions, uniformity, and artificial inputs (including GMO-derived rennet). The cheese that results from the conventional approach is consistent… but misses a lot in terms of flavor profile and nutrients.

Trevor Warmedahl is a cheesemaker, fermentation educator and the author of Cheese Trekking. Today, he takes us on a cheese adventure, as we gain insight on traditional, artisanal cheesemaking. He gives us pause about what is in our fridge and where it comes from.

Trevor has trekked all over the world, working alongside artisanal cheesemakers, so he understands and shares the importance of working with (instead of against) microbes and nature. He describes cheeses you may have never heard of, along with unique approaches to making them. Trevor also helps us take stock of what has been lost in our modern approach to cheesemaking.

Visit Trevor’s website: sourmilkschool.com

Become a member and/or donate to the Weston A. Price Foundation at westonaprice.org

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Trevor Warmedahl.

Ninety percent of the cheese consumed in North America is made with a genetically-modified ingredient often called or labeled vegetarian rennet. The truth is that in industrialized cheese-making, the process relies on multiple artificial inputs and a sterile environment that is very far removed from how traditional artisanal cheesemakers work with cheese and process it.

This is Episode 569. Our guest is Trevor Warmedahl. Trevor is a cheesemaker, a fermentation expert and educator, and the author of Cheese Trekking. He has worked alongside artisanal cheesemakers in Georgia, Italy, Mongolia, and other remote corners of the planet. Plus, he once worked in industrial cheese-making. He offers unique insights, comparing the worldview even, of the different approaches to cheese-making in today’s world.

In this conversation, it’s really broader than just cheese. Trevor covers the respect for life and animals and even the sacredness of milk that he found among traditional cheesemakers. He reminds us of how far removed most of us are from our food sources. He also busts some myths along the way related to our attempts to keep milk safe and sterile and even the idea of vegetarian cheese.

Before we get into the conversation, the Weston A. Price Foundation is a nonprofit. It is member-supported. It relies on your donations and joining hands with us to keep our work of education, research, and activism going strong. If you’re a member, great. You can always just give a donation. If you’re not a member, join hands with us. Use the code, POD10, and you can join for only $30 for the year. Either way, go to Weston A. Price Foundation to lend a hand and partner with us in our important work. If you’ve benefited in any way, we would appreciate it very much. This is Hilda Labrada Gore and you’re reading Wise Traditions.

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Welcome to Wise Traditions, Trevor.

Thank you for having me, Hilda. I’m happy to be here.

The Astonishing Way Sheep Are Milked In Sicily

Your travels are so inspiring. You’re a man after my own heart. I love your book, Cheese Trekking. I got an advanced copy. I’ve been devouring it. I want to start with your story of what happened when you were among some shepherds. I guess it was in Sicily. You were watching them milk the sheep and you were astonished. Tell us why.

A lot of my travels have centered around unlearning the things that I had learned in America as a cheesemaker and someone who works with dairy animals. In America and in most of Europe and a lot of the world, attempts are made to keep milk as clean as possible. Which has resulted in almost cleaning up the animals and using chemical products on their udders to try to prevent anything from getting into the milk.

When you look at how animals are milked in many other places, it’s a lot less intensive. There’s more debris and stuff getting into the milk. This isn’t seen as a problem. In Sicily, I was working, volunteering with some shepherds. I was at milking time, observing what they were doing, helping them move the sheep around. They would milk by hand. I watched as they were milking. It’s dust and it’s going to be like fecal matter and things that are stuck in the wool of the animal falling directly into the milk. They’re just milking into a five gallon bucket held between their legs.

I was shocked to see the amount of debris that fell in and then got filtered out when they were done with the process of milking. I was concerned to see this and, as a cheese maker, to watch them then make this milk into cheese almost immediately. I couldn’t imagine that this would result in anything that tasted good. I thought this was dangerous, right? But not only was the cheese safe and edible, it was, in fact, delicious. Delicious in a way that I don’t see expressed in a lot of cheeses made in places where the process has been cleaned up to a larger degree.

Contamination Is Life

It’s so fascinating. It’s the opposite of the way we operate here in the US. Like you said, we think, “Let’s keep things as sterile as possible. Let’s put iodine on the teats. Let’s even get rid of the first bit of milk because it might be contaminated in some way.” I think you said in your book, “Contamination is life.” Can you tell me more about that point of view, Trevor?

Yeah. This phrase, “Contamination is another word for life,” is something that I feel very strongly about especially on the microbial level. It’s so hard to prevent microbes from being in the spaces that we live in. When we look at what happens when we make that attempt, we see that it, in fact, has some pretty serious negative consequences for our health. In my mind, things like yeasts which are in the air everywhere we go and bacteria which are on our bodies, on our food, are supposed to be there.

This is a part of living on this planet. To try to draw a line and say that these foods that we have have to be kept free from life or free from interaction with the places where we live, I think, is a dangerous idea. We’ve made this experiment with this concept of antibiotics, the antimicrobial paradigm, which is at the basis of this concept of contamination. I think the experiment has failed and that we need to look back at ways that we can move in a more probiotic direction.

Just by simply looking at something like milk and saying that the bacteria that are in there are not necessarily contaminants, but they are an inherent part of the ecology of that milk would be the same as looking at like an ecosystem and viewing the species that are there as being active participants in it rather than labeling them as being native or invasive, right? It gets to the same underlying issue with how we view biology.

I am also cognizant of the fact, like you said, that we don’t have to be as sterile as we’ve tried to be. As a matter of fact, it is messing us up. We have more asthma, more allergies, all these things. The more we try to live in a bubble. If I remember correctly, these very Sicilian shepherds that you described were also dipping their hands in the milk so that they would be more lubricated when they were milking the sheep. Is that right?

Yeah. I’ve seen this happen in multiple places, which again was something that shocked me. Just like the idea that we would allow our bodies to interact with the milk. Especially when you look at these guys, their hands are pretty dirty, right? Like farmer hands. We think of the milk as being this pristine thing that we’re trying to keep in this pristine state, but that attempt isn’t made in so many other places.

I’ve seen this multiple times. These guys put their hands in the milk and continue to milk the animals. There’s just not the lines of separation that I was raised with. This was a part of breaking down those lines of separation and realizing that when we didn’t try to compartmentalize and control the process so much that actually this is when amazing flavors could be expressed in the cheeses.

When we refrain from trying to compartmentalize and control the cheesemaking process, amazing flavors are expressed in the cheese.

How Terroir Is Applies In Cheesemaking

I think in the title of your book, you mentioned terroir, which is often a term we associate with wines. In other words, the environment in which the grapes are grown, the amount of sun they get, the care, the manure, the fertilization from the animals and so forth, all affect the flavor and the nuances of the wine. How is that related to cheese?

The term terroir has been popularized through wine meaning generally a taste of place. The wines of different regions have different flavor profiles. With wine, it’s pretty direct because it’s a single fruit coming out of soil, right? The soil is directly impacting the chemical constituents of that fruit along with the climate and the farming practices of where the wine is grown.

That term, once it starts to be applied to other foods, it can be just as direct, like with something like apples and cider. With cheese and milk, it becomes a little bit more complex, I think. Because of how complex milk is and the number of steps that go into turning it into cheese. A lot of people don’t think there is terroir in cheese. What I’ve found is that in most of the cheeses that we can buy at the grocery store. Even the artisan raw milk cheeses, they don’t have this depth that I distinguish as terroir. Because everything has been done to remove that from the process.

Terroir has been removed from milk by trying to produce it with as low bacterial counts as possible. As the milk is standardized and seen as a blank slate that you turn into cheese. Then the milk is fermented with starter cultures that are purchased from transnational corporations. There are two companies that provide the vast majority of the world’s starter cultures. People are using the same products with milk that are not very expressive to produce cheeses that end up tasting very similar to one another.

The fact that it’s not perceivable is probably because people haven’t experienced it. They haven’t tasted cheeses that still have this connection to place. Because these cheeses are marginalized, they can’t really become scaled up and industrialized or they would lose what made them unique. For me, I was looking for this concept. I was searching for terroir and I found it in a great number of cheeses. That’s what I’m discussing in the book. My ideas about terroir and how I explain it, the mechanisms for how it functions.

Navigating The Homogenization Of Cheese

I think about how, on a road trip or on the train, I’ll see town after town with the same kind of shops. They’ve all got a Subway or a KFC or a Taco Bell. There’s this homogenization that’s happened to our cities. If I’m hearing you correctly, this is what’s happened to our cheeses. We’ve made them so drab and bland. There’s a nice, I guess, familiarity to them, if you want to put it that way. The American palette is accustomed to certain cheese profiles. But there’s so much more out there that we’re unaware of, right?

Yeah, definitely. I think it’s in America that this homogenization of foods has reached its extreme. But then, there’s been a kind of a revolt against that, right? I think people now are searching for this taste of place in their food. They’re searching for connection to the people who are growing the food and the animals and the plants that are producing it.

I think it’s a really unique point in history and that this turning back is happening, which is why I can write about this stuff. There’s a good response to it because I think this is what people are looking for. This sense of uniqueness and expression in their foods to not just seek the same cheese anywhere in the world without any variety. But to actually embrace the seasonality and diversity of our foods.

With fermented food, it’s even more extreme, that diversity. With food like cheese, I think it’s infinite. The numbers of flavors and textures that can evolve from milk. This is why I’ve chosen this as my food to focus on. What I’m doing after writing the book is bringing these ideas back to the US. Exploring ways that maybe terroir can be built again and what will it take to generate it in our cheeses for the future.

Wise Traditions | Trevor Warmedah | Cheesemaking — Cheese Trekking: How Microbes, Landscapes, Livestock, and Human Cultures Shape Terroir

Does that mean not turning to commercial starters or even renting it, but using what’s available locally? Is that part of the shift that we’re looking for?

Yeah, I think so. The movement towards raw milk and raw milk cheese is the start of it. But for me, it’s maybe not enough. When we start with raw milk, that’s a good first step, definitely. But if we are storing it in refrigeration temperatures, it’s not good for the ecology of that raw milk. Whereas in a lot of the world to this day and historically everywhere, milk was made after the animals were milked. You take the warm milk and you turn it into cheese almost immediately. This is the safest and the most natural way to make cheese. We have to look at how we handle milk.

The starter cultures for me are the big ones. Once we can start fermenting milk with starters that we maintain ourselves, the way people do with yogurt or kefir or sourdough, you can do a very similar thing with milk. Make cheese with microbes that are indigenous to milk. You can cultivate them in different ways. That’s, I think, the point that I’m trying to emphasize the most, along with rennet.

Rennet is a whole discussion in itself. It’s the same thing with the cultures. There’s a few companies that sell all of the rennet in the world. They’re huge transnational corporations, like biotech companies. This is the equivalent of Monsanto or a huge seed company. These same ingredients in cheese have followed a similar trajectory to what happened with vegetables and the reliance on purchased inputs. It’s very similar. For me, this is how we can start to get back towards terroir. To look at the ingredients, the cultures, the rennet, and finally the salt and ask how we can relocalize and build diversity back into these ingredients.

Raising The Alarm On Fermentation-Produced Chymosin

I saw somewhere online, Trevor, that most cheeses come from Pfizer or something like that. Is that true? Is there any truth to that? Is that what you’re alluding to?

Pfizer made the patent on this genetically modified rennet. About 90% of the cheese in North America and probably the world is made with a product that’s technically called fermentation-produced chymosin, FPC. A lot of people call it vegetarian rennet. I think it was patented in ‘91. It was the first genetically modified ingredient to go into our food system. It was passed by the FDA without anybody raising a fuss. There was no movement against this stuff yet and so it was approved.

It’s a single enzyme, 100% chymosin, which is the enzyme that coagulates milk in a young animal’s stomach. A cell from a calf stomach was spliced with a fungus, creating a fungus that produces just this enzyme. This entered our food system without anyone’s knowledge and is now like the dominant product around the world. It doesn’t have to be labeled as a GMO. Maybe in Europe, they’ve changed the laws. Originally, it wasn’t labeled as a GMO because it’s technically a by-product of a genetically modified organism. The organism is separate. It’s producing an enzyme that’s sold.

It was very sneaky how it got passed. It’s been very politicized due to animal rights, ethics, and these ideas of vegetarian cheese. This product that’s now made by a couple of companies is the result of a genetically modified organism and it is in our food. It’s in almost all cheese unless they’re using animal rennet or true plant rennet. Animal rennet is common for artisan cheese makers. Plant rennet is pretty rare outside of Portugal and some very specific cheeses.

If we see on the cheese label vegetarian rennet, almost guaranteed it’s a byproduct of this genetically modified compound.

That’s correct. I think they just have to say enzymes on the ingredients list because it is just a single enzyme that’s in there and maybe salt and preservatives. That’s why I think that the term vegetarian rennet is very misleading. It should be referred to as GMO rennet. Obviously, they don’t want to call it that. People who are selling food don’t want to call it that because it has connotations which should be considered when we’re purchasing these foods. The transparency isn’t there. Just the whole topic of rennet is very misunderstood and controversial. It really gets to the ethical dilemmas of consuming dairy products and cheese.

Demystifying The Process And Ingredients Of Cheesemaking

Let’s demystify that a little bit. Because I read your book or I’ve been reading it. I know that rennet is one of the components that’s often used in cheese-making. It has to do with a calf’s stomach or something. Can you explain?

Yeah. I describe cheese-making as being a biological process. Humans didn’t invent this process. It is what milk is designed or has evolved to do. When a baby animal drinks its mother’s milk, obviously it’s a liquid. For ruminant livestock, sheep, goats, cows, the milk goes directly to the fourth compartment of their digestive tract. The first three compartments are just for digesting grass which is obviously done by microbes, not really by the body of the animal.

The milk goes directly to the fourth compartment, which is the equivalent of our stomach. It’s highly acidic. The milk coagulates in that compartment. Basically, the abomasum of the young animal is producing enzymes. Chymosin is the main one that turns that milk into a solid form. Once the milk has coagulated, it’s what I refer to as cheese. It’s solid milk. The stomach squeezes it and starts to extract nutrients, which continues down through the intestines.

The liquid state of milk is really just a temporary state in order to transfer the nutrients from the body of the mother to her child. Once it gets to the child’s body, it needs to coagulate. If the milk doesn’t coagulate and it remains a liquid, it will pass through too fast. There’s issues for that young animal. This is what milk is designed to do. It’s designed to coagulate.

Humans, at some point, figured out that when you remove this organ. It could have been done before people were even milking animals by hunters or something. Remove this organ and find inside of it cheese. And then, realize that if they take that, chop it up, put it into milk, it will turn that milk into cheese. We don’t know when this happened historically. It looks like before rennet cheeses. There was a lot of sour milk, kind of like yogurt cheeses, and things based on acid and heat.

The technology of rennet came a little bit later but now it’s the dominant way to make most of what we think of as cheese. We have done a biomimicry sort of thing. We extract this organ from the young animals and use it to make cheese. Of course, these animals aren’t being sacrificed or killed or harvested, however you want to say it, just for this organ. Their death is a part of the process of dairying because we’re going to take that milk.

Usually, it’s the males who are being sacrificed for this. The milk that they would have drank in their lives becomes the milk that we’re going to use to make cheese. Not everywhere in the world does it that way. In some places, they raise all the male animals up until they’re older. Eventually, those animals are being harvested for meat. In my mind, the conversation around dairy implies the conversation around consumption of meat and the death of animals. There is no such thing as vegetarian milk or vegetarian cheese because death is always involved in the process of raising these animals. In my opinion, the ethical thing to do is to consume them.

When we’re talking about the young male animals, slaughtered at one to two months old. I believe their carcasses should be food for us. We should be honoring every part of this animal who sacrificed its life for us. That’s the conversation that I’m trying to have around rennet and vegetarian ethics. Just the moral dilemmas of consuming dairy products. We should face the reality of what’s happening. The way it’s happening in an industrial situation is, in my opinion, incredibly immoral. Something needs to be done to bring this stuff back home. I think that’s what people are looking for. Cheese and milk is a perfect way to have that conversation.

Trying Out Different Kinds Of Cheese Around The World

You’re talking about this moral dilemma for those who are concerned about animal welfare. Did you see any kind of dilemma along these lines in Spain, in India, in Italy, in Albania, in Georgia, and the different places you’ve been? Are the traditional peoples who are making cheese and all these kinds of artisanal ways and traditional ways, are they experiencing any kind of moral dilemma?

That’s a really good question. I think they are experiencing the dilemma but it’s more of a reality that is faced. I’ve met a lot of people. First of all, in the places that I’ve gone where people still make rennet from their herds, it’s always a breed of animal that the people identify with. It’s a part of their culture that they are the ones who keep this animal and they love it. They’re fighting to keep these breeds alive. A part of that fight is to continue to use the animals, to work with them the way they’ve traditionally been worked with. They’re being slaughtered. They’re being eaten. The organs are being removed to make rennet.

I’ve always seen these people treat these animals with the highest respect. I’ve also met a lot of cheesemakers who don’t want to do the slaughtering of the young animals themselves. Who are grappling with the ethics of that lifestyle. It’s still there but it’s much more black and white. It’s a daily conflict that has somewhat been resolved, I think.

Whereas the way that milk is produced in America and in industrial situations in any country is to completely divorce the people who are drinking the milk and eating the cheese from the process of farming. It’s almost like people don’t want to know the reality because it can be somewhat shocking, right? In most of the pastoral communities that I’ve stayed with, the realities of what dairying entails are very upfront. People are comfortable with the idea of killing and eating their animals that are a part of their herd. It’s not a sacrifice that’s made lightly. It’s done as a routine part of their farming system and their way of life.

It might have been in your chapter about Mongolia. It resonated with me because, 1) I’ve been there but, 2) I could just picture this older woman who was like, “We acknowledge and honor the animal.” See the milk and the cheese as, I don’t want to say, sacred. They understood they received it with reverence and gratitude. There’s much more communion, if you will, with the animals and with the land than most of us have as consumers back here in the US.

Definitely. I don’t think that sacred is too strong of a word. Milk is seen as sacred in the Mongolian cosmology. That’s what I think it deserves. It deserves that. Milk is such a foundational food. It’s so tied to motherhood and the birthing of young animals. It needs this sacredness. It needs to be seen as something that does require this huge sacrifice. Going to Mongolia and seeing how they treat milk there, seeing how women throw milk into the air and how animals are butchered without letting blood hit the ground. These are all treated as sacred substances. I think this is very much what we need to see and hear.

It’s the opposite of how we treat milk in America. When we buy milk in a plastic container in the grocery store, there’s no sense of animals. It’s factory milk, right? That’s why I think these conversations do mean so much because of what we’ve lost and what we’re hungry to get back to. A food like milk and cheese can really help us plug right back in. I’m glad to be spreading these messages because I think it’s necessary at this point in time to have them.

When we buy milk in a plastic container in the grocery store, there is no sense of the animals.

It’s so fabulous. I loved your philosophy of trekking around and working. Even if you didn’t know the language, you would connect with people over the common goal of making this cheese. You would work alongside them and drink and sleep and all the things. Here it is getting near the end of the episode. We haven’t even talked about the cheeses themselves. Some of the favorite ones that you came across. Can you describe either the ricotta from Italy? The cheese that was aged in the wooden barrels, I found that fascinating. What country was that in? Albania?

Yeah. I’ve seen it in two countries but Albania is the main one. This cheese made in Northern Albania is called Mishavine. It hasn’t really been studied. These are the cheeses that I look for. The ones that don’t get talked about in countries that aren’t really as renowned for their cheese-making like Albania. This cheese is made with sheep’s milk in the summertime.

There’s this whole style of cheese-making that has almost gone extinct where you would actually make multiple wheels of cheese on different days. Every morning, you’d make a wheel with the morning milk. In the evening, you make a wheel with the evening milk. You do the same thing for a couple of days and then you grind them all up, salt them, and pack it in some sort of a container to age. Probably originally this was animal hides. It’s still done in animal hides, especially in Turkey. In Albania, it’s now this wooden box. They make the cheese, grind it up, salt it, and pack it in these wooden boxes where it ages from August until December or something like that.

It’s kind of a proto-like cheddar type of a cheese because cheddar follows a similar process. This cheese was something I’d sought out. I read about these cheeses but I don’t usually get to actually try them until I show up. Which is an experience I’ve actually come to enjoy because I have to put a lot of effort to get to the place to meet the people who can help me find the cheese. Once I actually find it, it’s on a plate in front of me. I’m eating it there in the place where it’s made.

For me, this is crucial for the search for Chavroux is to eat the cheese where it’s made. That’s the only way to make the connections. I taste this cheese for the first time. I describe it in the book. When I find the cheeses and the foods that really speak to me, it’s almost like my brain shuts down. It’s like this extremely meditative, pure awareness. This is the state that I entered when I first tasted Mishavine. It was just very complex in its flavor. It was sour, like yogurt, but it was still sweet with some of the typical flavors of a sheep cheese, like butterscotch, caramel. It was fruity. There was a lot of input from yeasts and just this flavor of animality, which is sometimes lacking and scary for people.

I think a cheese from a sheep should taste somewhat like a sheep, right? That’s a flavor you would expect. It was amplified in this cheese. It was actually more like lamb and lanolin. Those stronger sheepy flavors came through in this cheese that is very rugged, very much not designed to meet everyone’s palates. It’s hardcore, but unabashedly itself and a product of its place and its people.

That was a cheese that impacted me in a deep way. It’s still being made but it’s slowly being lost or being adulterated. There’s counterfeit versions of it because it commands a higher price. The people who make it in the old way are still there. It’s a situation where anyone can go, visit this part of Albania, and stay in guest houses where they make the cheese. It’s actually quite accessible. There’s a kind of agri-tourism developing around the pastoral lifestyle up in Kelmend, the region, very close to Montenegro.

I like to talk about these cheeses and the people who shared them with me, the knowledge holders. I like to name them in the book so that if anyone wants to, they can go there and experience this cheese for themselves in the place where it’s made. See that it’s enmeshed in the cultural practices of the people who live there and who have lived there for a very long time.

Where do you hope to trek to next, if any place?

The two, or I guess, three places at the top of my list. Turkey and Romania have been at the top of my list for quite a while. I’ve just visited Romania for the first time, just for two weeks. There’s so much of foodways, crafts alive in Romania. The shepherd lifestyle in Romania, the making of cheeses in huts at higher elevation in the summer months. It’s still very alive and it’s getting support from the government. I want to go and see the traditional cheeses of Romania.

Turkey has so much in terms of communities. Ethnic groups were practicing pastoralism, especially mobile pastoralism where they’re moving seasonally. It is very much alive in Turkey. They have a fascinating dairy culture. These cheeses I was mentioning, aged in goat skins, are alive there. This is the style I really want to study in depth and learn how they’re made. Turkey is like a world of multiple lifetimes’ worth of food exploration.

A hundred percent.

I’m so fascinated with Turkey. I could go and just stay there forever. The other country I plan to visit is Lebanon. I’ve been wanting to go there for a while. It hasn’t felt right in 2025 or so, right? I want to go. First of all, they have these ancient cheeses. I’m interested in the idea of food that is surviving in the face of adversity. Food is like a cultural emblem and a rallying point for people. The fact that there is so much conflict and war happening there. I think it means we need to talk about these cheeses and these foods even more so because it’s all very much at risk. That’s a third country that I’d really love to visit in the coming years.

That’s so beautiful. So much understanding, as you said in your book, can be reached without words. Barriers can be crossed as you’re sharing the cheese and the food of the place and connecting in that profound way. What I loved about your book too is that, Trevor, you were super relatable when you were like, “I don’t think every cheese is delicious. Some of it is disgusting to the palate that’s unaccustomed to it.” Has there ever been a time when you’ve bitten into one and you’re just like, “No, thank you.”

Quite a few times. I seek out these cheeses that are scary and that I know I’m not going to like. A number of times I’ve found these cheeses and I’m like, “This is not tasty.” A couple of times I had the urge to spit a cheese out but I didn’t out of respect. I have tasted cheeses that were just offensively strong and/or something that was just psychologically challenging. Like a cheese with maggots in it, for instance.

Yes. I was just thinking about that because I think Bill Schindler went somewhere to have cheese with maggots. I was like, “Oh, that would be so hard to overcome, that psychological hurdle.”

Absolutely, it is. It’s famous in Sardinia, Casu Marzu. It’s one of their, again, a cultural emblem for them. It turns out there’s a history of cheeses that have maggots in them all over the place because before refrigeration, this just happened when you store cheese in a room that’s about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Once you start getting up around 60 degrees, flies can be active there. If you have cheeses, especially ones that have a pungency to them, the flies can get in there and lay their eggs inside of a cheese. There will be maggots in the cheese.

It was challenging to eat something like that. But, just knowing that it’s a food and knowing that there’s people who do appreciate it made me want to understand why that is. It’s not disgusting to eat it. It doesn’t taste awful. It’s just a psychological thing of getting yourself to consume it. Once you do, you realize that it’s actually a method of accelerating the ripening of cheese by having another critter in there, introducing its enzymes and digestive juices. It’s extreme but it makes sense. It can all be explained chemically.

Historically, I guess.

Absolutely, 100%.

I wanted to ask you as we start to wrap up. What do you say to the person who thinks it’s extreme in the first place just to consume raw milk or, as you call it in your book, sweet milk, just to have a raw cheese that they’re like, “Oh no, that’s too dangerous. I don’t want to go there”?

It’s a hard one because there obviously are risks with consuming milk. There’s risks with consuming any food but the risks with milk are very different. I think what I would do is I would explain to them that the reason why there’s this feeling of risk around raw milk is because of a broken farming system. That’s starting with unhealthy animals on an unhealthy diet and the end result is milk that is potentially unhealthy milk. Milk with a compromised immune system, as I call it.

When raw milk doesn’t have beneficial bacteria in it or when you pasteurize raw milk, it’s devoid or has only very low levels of bacteria. It becomes a potential problem. It’s a breeding ground for bacteria. Those can be bad bacteria if you don’t have the good ones in there, right? I would explain that that’s where the risks come from, from how we farm animals. And then, I would point towards the fermentation process as being probably the safest and most time-tested way of consuming milk in a state that is not only safe, but beneficial for our bodies.

By allowing the good bacteria to do their work and produce the flavors that we can all identify as being beneficial, that milk has been preserved and turned into a more shelf stable and more safe food to consume. Of course, drinking milk can be entirely safe and beneficial to our health as well. But, I would point towards the need for that milk to be fresh and for you to maybe have an idea where that milk came from.

Just point to the fact that the majority of foodborne illnesses associated with dairy products come from pasteurized milk products. Pasteurization is no guarantee of safety. It’s a very nuanced issue. I’m trying to break down this divide between like, “You’re either on the raw milk side or the pasteurized side.” There’s actually a lot more room for things to go right or for things to go wrong. There’s a lot more room for discussion. It can’t just be a black and white issue. It’s a whole spectrum of concerns.

Be Careful About Food Anxiety

Trevor, thank you. Thank you so much for answering that question, for all that you’ve brought to the world. The little seeds that you’ve planted, like you said at the end of your book. You’re just bringing what you’ve learned, your diversifying our intellectual and emotional microbiome, and inspiring us, I think, to have more cheese and more real life in our lives. I want to pose to you now the question I love to pose at the end. Trevor, if the reader could just do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

In regards to consuming fermented milk, sour milk, yogurt, kefir, I would say what I recommend is small doses daily. It’s regular consumption of these fermented milks seems to be the way to get the full health benefits from them. You don’t need to drink a liter every day. A small serving daily seems to really help get the benefits.

So much stress can come from worrying about our health. We get frenzied with trying to avoid bad things, and that in itself can be unhealthy.

In general, my advice is, I think it’s important to recognize how much stress can come from worrying about our health. We can become so concerned and frenzied with trying to avoid all the things that are bad and get all the things that are good that that can in itself be unhealthy. I think we need to be very careful about health anxiety and realize that that can be detrimental to our health. We all have a lot of concerns, obviously. I think relaxing, taking it in stride, and just thinking about our mental health is as important as considering what we’re putting in our bodies.

Wonderful words to end on. Trevor, on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, it’s been a pleasure to have you.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

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Our guest today was Trevor Warmedahl. You can visit his website, Sour Milk School, to learn more. I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this podcast on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can find me at HolisticHilda.com.

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About Trevor Warmedahl

Trevor Warmedahl is a cheesemaker and fermentation educator who writes about the relationships between milk microbes, livestock, landscapes, and human cultures. His project Milk Trekker involves documenting traditional dairying and cheesemaking practices in various countries. Sour Milk School is his mobile educational endeavor to spread information about natural cheesemaking and the philosophy of working with rather than against microbes.