Hiking the world in search of rare cheeses

Trevor Warmedahl left a commercial cheesemaking job in Seattle to track down traditional, place-driven cheesemaking around the world. He has spent years hitchhiking, hiking and volunteering across more than 20 countries, living with herder families, teaching workshops and completing long treks such as a 193 km route across the Peaks of the Balkans. His travels include a summer in Mongolia milking yaks and sampling byaslag and aaruul, and months in Georgia’s highlands making Tushuri guda with shepherds who age cheese in inside-out sheepskins. He seeks out remote producers who maintain old techniques, traveling with little plan and using festivals and local cheesemongers to connect with communities.

He argues that cheese is an “edible manifestation of place,” embodying landscape, livestock, microbes and cultural history, and that natural farmstead cheeses reveal stewardship and resilience useful under climate stress. Industrialisation, he warns, erodes heritage breeds and methods, so preserving pastoral cheesemaking matters for biodiversity and culture. He urges responsible “lacto-culinary” tourism: find local cheesemongers, support producers directly, avoid romanticising or turning farmers into museum pieces, and be willing to repeatedly taste challenging cheeses - examples range from Norway’s gammelost to Turkey’s goatskin-aged tulum peyniri.