Trevor Warmedahl Turns Remote Cheese into a Map of Culture and Place
Trevor Warmedahl built his career around a simple frustration: he was making cheese in Seattle from milk produced by animals he never saw. That break in the chain between producer, landscape and product sent him in the opposite direction. He quit, began traveling, and set out to find places where cheese still carries the imprint of herd, season, climate and custom.
The result has been a six-year global pursuit across more than 20 countries, shaped by hitchhiking, hiking and long overland journeys to farms and mountain settlements. In Warmedahl’s telling, cheese is not just a food. It is a record of how people live, what they value, and how they adapt to difficult terrain.
His latest trek covered 193km across the Peaks of the Balkans Trail, but the more revealing journeys have often happened far from formal routes. In 2019, he reached Ulaanbaatar, lived alone in a yurt with a dog, and quickly found himself immersed in a setting where dairy carried ritual meaning. Women flicked milk into the air before cheesemaking in a gesture of respect known as a milk libation. Whey bubbled over central hearths, fresh unripened byaslag covered tables, and dairy products appeared in offerings at shrines as symbols of purity.
That kind of detail matters because it shows cheesemaking operating as both food production and social language. In Mongolia, Warmedahl did not encounter dairy as an isolated commodity. He saw it embedded in ceremony, migration, pastoral labor and family life. As summer unfolded, city dwellers moved to the steppe to farm, and he followed that rhythm onto the Gobi-bound sleeper train and then into rural grassland life with a herder family in Zavkhan.
Milk, Herds and the Long Memory of Pastoral Life
The work that followed was physical, repetitive and deeply local. He woke before dawn to milk yaks, rode horses to chase livestock up valleys, listened to shepherds sing at sunset and cooked milk into dehydrated sweet-and-sour curds called aaruul. Those experiences shaped the way he describes cheese now: as an edible manifestation of place, of cultural history transformed into food.
Georgia became one of the clearest examples of that idea. In Tusheti, near the village of Omalo, Warmedahl found what he calls “fossil cheeses” — ancestral cheeses that nearly vanished and are now reappearing as part of a broader post-Soviet cultural revival. The setting was stark: a valley ending in an abrupt cliff, medieval stone towers in decay, shepherds building camps from the ruins around them. There, sheep were milked by hand into wooden pails, and Tushuri guda was aged inside-out in sheepskins.
One sentence captures the physicality of the place: he walked about 130km back down the valley with shepherds and 300 sheep.
The movement of that herd across generations was as important as the cheese itself. The animals knew the route. The people coordinated around that inherited knowledge. Dogs barked, sheep strayed into ravines, and the whole scene carried a lawless energy that no polished tasting room could reproduce. At night, campfires and shared food bridged language barriers. Food became the conversational medium when words fell short.
Why Heritage Cheeses Persist in Marginal Places
Warmedahl’s work draws attention to why certain cheeses survive in remote areas long after industrial food systems have standardized milk production. Pastoral cheesemaking can move with climate, terrain and ecological stress. Animals can graze in places that suit local conditions, and they convert grass into milk in ways that tie dairy production to the surrounding environment rather than to a centralized supply chain.
This is where his observations become more than romantic travel writing. Heritage cheeses often depend on older systems of stewardship, in which farmers maintain a close relationship with livestock and land. In that setting, cheese preserves diversity — not only in flavor, but in breeds, practices and local knowledge. Industrialisation has narrowed that diversity at alarming speed, making the survival of farmstead traditions a matter of cultural as well as agricultural consequence.
He also argues that cheese reveals how much of food culture is learned rather than innate. A greyish-brown Norwegian cheese such as gammelost, covered in mould and described as tasting like a musty cellar, may seem off-putting at first. Warmedahl’s response is not to dismiss it, but to insist on repeated tasting. “Don’t try something once, try it 10 times,” he says. The point is not novelty for its own sake. The point is that flavor is social, and appreciation develops inside a cultural context.
Responsible Travel Through the Lens of Dairy
Warmedahl’s approach to travel is inseparable from his ethics. He encourages visitors to find the local cheesemonger, ask which makers truly represent the area, and support producers whose work stays rooted in the community. He also warns against turning farms into staged performances for outsiders. Mud, broken equipment and rough edges are part of rural life. Sanitizing every detail for visitors can force farmers into caricatures of tradition, as if authenticity depended on recreating a museum exhibit.
A single farm visit can become a form of cultural exchange when travelers arrive with genuine curiosity rather than a checklist. “Feed me what you eat” is one of his guiding ideas, and it captures the practical side of hospitality. Once people see that interest is sincere, the interaction deepens. The cheese is no longer just a sample; it becomes a route into memory, labor and local history.
Turkey sits at the top of his wish list, especially tulum peyniri, a cheese aged in furry goatskins and tied to pastoral life. He describes it as a universe of cheese that deserves more attention than it receives in Western Europe-centric food narratives. The reaction is consistent with the rest of his journey: the most memorable cheeses are often the ones made furthest from the center, by people who continue old methods because those methods still fit the world around them.
Warmedahl’s travels do not prove that remote cheeses are better in any absolute sense. They do show how closely dairy can hold together ecology, ritual, migration, survival and identity. His notebooks and workshops keep returning to the same point: when milk is transformed by specific land and specific hands, it carries more than flavor. It carries a place’s memory.