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    Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese
    Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese
    Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese
    Ebook484 pages9 hours

    Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese

    By Bronwen Percival and Francis Percival

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    In little more than a century, industrial practices have altered every aspect of the cheesemaking process, from the bodies of the animals that provide the milk to the microbial strains that ferment it. Reinventing the Wheel explores what has been lost as raw-milk, single-farm cheeses have given way to the juggernaut of factory production. In the process, distinctiveness and healthy rural landscapes have been exchanged for higher yields and monoculture. However, Bronwen and Francis Percival find reason for optimism. Around the world—not just in France, but also in the United States, England, and Australia—enterprising cheesemakers are exploring the techniques of their great-grandparents. At the same time, using sophisticated molecular methods, scientists are upending conventional wisdom about the role of microbes in every part of the world. Their research reveals the resilience and complexity of the indigenous microbial communities that contribute to the flavor and safety of cheese. One experiment at a time, these dynamic scientists, cheesemakers, and dairy farmers are reinventing the wheel.  
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateSep 5, 2017
    ISBN9780520964464
    Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes, and the Fight for Real Cheese
    Author

    Bronwen Percival

    Bronwen Percival is the cheese buyer for Neal's Yard Dairy in London. In addition to working with cheesemakers and the company's maturation team to select and optimise the quality of the cheese they sell, she works to mobilise collaboration between cheesemakers and the scientific community. Bronwen served as an editor for the Oxford Companion to Cheese, winner of the 2017 James Beard Award for Reference & Scholarship.

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      Reinventing the Wheel - Bronwen Percival

      PRAISE FOR REINVENTING THE WHEEL

      We need to reclaim cheese in all its natural diversity and strengthen the artisanal producers in their battle against the big players and their lobby. Real cheese—and real life, for that matter —is all about microbial diversity, not sterility. Bronwen and Francis Percival state this in all its urgency. They offer a wealth of information in a very accessible and convincing way, without any academic jargon. A much-needed book which should be required reading for everybody, way beyond the experts—we all start with milk.

      URSULA HEINZELMANN, author of Beyond Bratwurst, co-curator of Cheese Berlin, and Director of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery

      Like almost everyone I know, I consider myself a lover of cheese, but this book sparked a deeper passion for raw-milk cheese. Stunningly rich and detailed, funny, fascinating, political, but not for a moment dull or overwhelming. Essential reading for anyone who enjoys cheese but has perhaps never considered its value, its meaning, or its potential.

      JAMES HOFFMANN, author of The World Atlas of Coffee

      This beautifully written and inspiring book is calling for nothing short of a revolution of cheesemaking and cheese culture. Bronwen and Francis Percival movingly remind us that real cheese is a living embodiment of the landscapes, soils, bacteria, grasses, native-breed cows, and cultural traditions that form its backstory. We should read this book mindful of the real risk that unless we rage against the headlong rush into industrialization, commodification, and sterilization that characterizes most modern cheesemaking, a priceless part of our cultural heritage will be lost forever.

      PATRICK HOLDEN, Chief Executive, Sustainable Food Trust

      Though the cheese producers profiled by the Percivals are geographically distant from the regions where coffee grows, many of the challenges these producers face are remarkably similar to those of tropical smallholder farmers. These shared global struggles—to prioritize unique flavor attributes over low prices, for example, and to communicate the merits of sustainable agricultural and husbandry practices—are a reminder of the fragility of the foods we treasure and the choices we face daily about what we value.

      KIM ELENA IONESCU, Chief Sustainability Officer, Specialty Coffee Association

      All the reasons why cheese is more important than you thought it was.

      ANDREW JEFFORD, author of The New France and Peat Smoke and Spirit

      The Percivals pull back the curtain on the fascinating world of artisanal cheese production, exploring and explaining the microbiology involved in clear and accessible language. While this book should be read immediately by anyone who professes to take cheese seriously, it’s also an instant classic for readers interested in history, science, cuisine, and combinations of all of the above. This is exactly the kind of book that needed to be written on cheese, striking a balance between connoisseurship, critical analysis, technical knowledge, and true love of cheese and cheese culture. I hope scholars of other areas of food take notice and follow suit.

      ARIELLE JOHNSON, MIT Media Lab

      This is a book about cheese ecology that delves deep into the importance of context and explores each of the myriad factors that determine different outcomes in cheese. Be ready for a broad education in the history and science of breeding, feeding, and handling milking herds, along with the evolution of cheesemaking processes, approaches to microbe management, and much more. Milk and cheese are demystified and explained, with far-ranging discussions of great interest to anyone with an insatiable curiosity about cheese, or food production more broadly.

      SANDOR ELLIX KATZ, author of Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation

      "This is a cheese book like no other. Blending science and storytelling, the Percivals build a compelling and passionate case for why, in the face of overwhelming industrialization, traditional practices result in not only higher quality and more authentic character but also increased safety and sustainability. Above all, they demonstrate why we should be talking about cheese farming, not cheese making, illustrating how great cheese, like great wine, is an expression of its raw materials. It’s an engaging and eye-opening read, and it explores the cheese industry in unprecedented detail and complexity, inspiring me to entirely reevaluate what I had previously thought was a familiar food."

      PETER LIEM, author of Champagne and ChampagneGuide.net

      "Reinventing the Wheel is a masterful cheese treatise—timely and prescient, poignant yet hopeful, and impassioned throughout."

      MAX MCCALMAN, author of Mastering Cheese

      This book hits the sweet spot for culinary lovers like me who find something universal in the story of cheese. The authors’ lively account of art and science working in tandem will appeal to aficionados of all things fermented. It was such a good read, I could not bear to finish it.

      ODESSA PIPER, founder of L’Etoile Restaurant, Madison, Wisconsin, and author of The Market Kitchen

      "Reinventing the Wheel takes a tough, smart look at the global cheesemaking industry and offers up sage and sane ideas to take farmhouse cheese back to the future. The Percivals manage to dissect nearly every aspect of cheesemaking—from microbes to grass to animal breeds to the cheese house to the market forces that shape the cheesemaking industry—with a wit and intelligence that will tickle the intellectual appetite of cheese professionals the world over. Josiah Twamley would be proud."

      ANNE SAXELBY, founder of Saxelby Cheesemongers, New York

      Bronwen and Francis Percival’s fascinating book will help readers understand what makes great cheese special and provides cheesemakers with a road map for making cheese of distinction. We come away musing that like in wine, cheese is a craft that has its roots in nature, culture, and the vast world of microbes. This book celebrates the infinite details involved, encourages us to care about this dying art, and makes us hungry for a piece of delicious, authentic farmhouse cheese.

      DIANA AND JEREMY SEYSSES of Domaine Dujac, Burgundy

      We now have validation of those tried and true cheesemaking skills that we have all so passionately defended. This is a must-have resource for cheesemakers—and cheese lovers!

      PEGGY SMITH, founder of Cowgirl Creamery, San Francisco

      Vigorous, precise writing and admirable clarity of thought allied to a vision seemingly as wide and deep as all of nature make this a must-read, and not only for cheeseheads!

      TERRY THEISE, author of Reading between the Wines

      "I have admired Francis’s and Bronwen’s work since before meeting them. Reinventing the Wheel enhances my admiration. This much-needed addition to cheese literature explores the history, science, and current issues of cheesemaking with engaging portraits of the people, places, and processes behind a most-beloved staple. Part treatise, part primer, and wholly readable, this monumental work will enlighten the amateur and professional alike."

      JAMES TIDWELL, MS, cofounder of TEXSOM

      REINVENTING THE WHEEL

      CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN FOOD AND CULTURE

      Darra Goldstein, Editor

      UC Logo

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Oakland, California

      © 2017 by Bronwen Percival and Francis Percival

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Percival, Bronwen, author. | Percival, Francis, 1978– author.

      Title: Reinventing the wheel : milk, microbes, and the fight for real cheese / Bronwen Percival, Francis Percival.

      Other titles: California studies in food and culture ; 65.

      Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Series: California studies in food and culture ; 65 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017006845 | ISBN 9780520290150 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520964464 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Cheesemaking. | Cheesemaking—Technological innovations. | Dairy farming—Technological innovations. | Cheese—Microbiology. | Raw milk—Microbiology. | Cheesemakers. | Cheese industry.

      Classification: LCC SF271 .P47 2017 | DDC 637/.3—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006845

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

      10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      If a Dedication or Introduction to the following Work should be thought necessary, I most humbly and justly address it to the excellent DAIRY-WOMEN, of Great Britain; duly sensible, that from them I received the first hints that led me to the performance, and without whose assistance and encouragement, joined with my own knowledge and experience, I should never have offered it to the Public.

      JOSIAH TWAMLEY,

      Dairying Exemplified, 1787

      CONTENTS

      List of Illustrations

      Prologue: The Lost World

      ONE•Ecologies

      TWO•Real Cheese

      THREE•The Third Rail

      FOUR•Breed

      FIVE•Feed

      SIX•Microbes

      SEVEN•Risk

      EIGHT•Cultures

      NINE•Families and Factories

      TEN•Expertise

      ELEVEN•Markets

      TWELVE•Reinventing the Wheel

      Acknowledgments

      Appendix: How to Buy Cheese

      Glossary

      Notes

      Index

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      1. Yogurt-like lactic curds being molded, and the resulting brittle texture of lactic cheeses

      2. Small grains of sweet curd used to make Comté, and the supple texture of the freshly molded cheese

      3. Glossy, low-acid soft cheese curds, and the smooth, spoonable texture of Winnimere cheese

      4. Appleby’s Cheshire curds acidifying as they drain in the vat, and the open, friable texture of the finished cheese

      5. Cheeses organized according to the moisture and acidity of their curds at the point of molding

      6. The cheese biodiversity chain

      7. The cultural cognition model applied to cheese

      8. Cheddar curds from a typical modern make immediately before milling, and curds from an experimental batch of Cheddar inspired by Dora Saker’s Practical Cheddar Cheese-Making

      PROLOGUE

      THE LOST WORLD

      A Lost World sits high in the mountains of the Auvergne in central France, a land of summer mists and long-dormant volcanoes. As every French child is taught in elementary school, it is here that the great French national myth has its origins, where the Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix gallantly resisted Julius Caesar. In lulls between their skirmishes, the adversaries at the Battle of Gergovia may well have eaten the local cheese. Certainly, the cheese attracted the attention of the Romans. Pliny the Elder even mentions it in his Naturalis Historia. With a documented history of two millennia, it is cheese outside of time.

      We are here to visit Guy Chambon, one of only five remaining producers of Salers Tradition, and the cheese seems an appropriate object of pilgrimage. Made in huge near-hundred-pound wheels, Salers has a firm but supple paste and smells of straw, broth, and butter. Texturally, this is the closest that French cheese gets to Cheddar, but the flavor is free-spirited and feral, unlike any other cheese in the world. Salers is primal.

      But first we must get to the top of the mountain. A long and winding drive alternates dizzying hairpin turns with glimpses of the plateau of the Massif Central. It has been millions of years since the last eruption, but craters and the rounded domes of extinct volcanoes still scar the landscape. Once we have abandoned the car near the peak, there is still a brisk hike to Chambon’s buron, the austere mountain chalet where he makes cheese throughout the spring and summer season. It is nearly three in the afternoon, and we are just in time for the evening milking.

      Dairy farmers from biblical times would recognize Chambon’s method. The trappings of modern food production—of obsessive hygiene, efficiency of scale, and employee comfort—are nowhere to be found. Even a roofed milking parlor is conspicuously absent. Cows are milked in the field, without electricity or running water. The cows themselves are also from another era. Deep mahogany in color, with chunky bodies and impressive horns, Salers cows look like bovine triceratops. Almost all Salers are farmed for meat, and with their hardy bodies they require next to no supervision on the exposed mountainside. Only 5 percent of Salers cows are milked. Those that are give roughly a third the milk of a typical black-and-white Holstein.

      Notoriously surly, the Salers will not let down their milk in the absence of their young, so the calves are brought to a small pen near their mothers. Mother and calf share the same name, and one by one the calves are called forth and allowed to suckle for a few seconds before milking commences; dexterous tongues and saliva do the herdsman’s job of cleaning the mothers’ teats. Chambon’s family assist with practiced care, his wife sternly handling the mature cows while his teenage son chases their calves. Tall and rangy, the son’s adolescent physique matches that of the calves; when one escapes, he chases it down in a tangle of lanky teenaged limbs.

      Chambon is a stout man in a stained boiler suit, and he enjoys entertaining his audience. As he works, he keeps up a colorful commentary for the small group of curious hikers that has assembled on this sunny afternoon. It includes details about his herd—one cow, twenty years old, has had eighteen calves—but mostly consists of trash talk about the previous night’s rugby match. When he does the first milking in the early hours of the morning, or on those days when the weather is not so sympathetic, Chambon works without any onlookers. It takes him two hours to milk the entire herd of sixty cows.

      Once the calf has briefly suckled on its mother’s teats, he deftly prizes it away, tying it to her front leg so that it cannot reach the udder while he milks. A bit of salt placed on the back of the calf’s neck encourages the mother to lick it, and mother and baby quietly bond while Chambon works. After a while, the tourists lose interest and head off back down the mountain, and the only sound is the musical ringing of the cowbells.

      As milking progresses, the warm milk is collected in wooden vats, known as gerles, which are used for years on end without ever seeing a cleaning chemical. Seeing the gerles, our host and guide gestures with enthusiasm. She turns to us and smiles: Yes, says Dr. Marie-Christine Montel, wood is good!

      SCIENCE OVER A BARREL

      The cheese made in this part of the Auvergne survived the Romans, the Black Death, and the Nazis, but in 2004 its future looked bleak as it met its most implacable foes: public health officials unconvinced that a cocktail of milk and calf spit allowed to sour in a wooden bucket was fit for human consumption. The French food safety agency, the Agence française de sécurité sanitaire des aliments, was skeptical that it was possible for Salers to meet modern food safety requirements. Conflict between producers and public health bureaucrats is often couched in the apocalyptic language of clashing civilizations. In this case, it was quite literally true, with Iron Age Gaul struggling against postindustrial Europe.

      In part, the conflict stemmed from the internal political situation within the local cheese industry. The legislative and institutional framework within which Salers cheese is made is, to put it charitably, a mess. Looking back across the millennia, all of the cheese of the region was called Cantal, the name of the local mountain range and the modern administrative département—a name that carries great historical resonance. However, during the twentieth century, Cantal production began to change. As cooperatives ramped up their scale of production and began to farm more intensively, the old style of free-range mountainside cheesemaking on seasonal pastures was under threat. In response, in 1961 a new protected name, Salers, was created for producers who wanted to work within the free-range tradition. It would be the grand cru of Cantal.

      That, at least, was the idea. However, the rules that defined Salers cheese were lax and ill-drafted. The wooden gerles could be of any size, from the tubby two-hundred-liter barrels that Guy Chambon uses to thousand-liter vats employed by larger operations. Using milk from the indomitable Salers breed was optional, and many producers chose instead to use the milk of high-yielding, docile Holsteins. Salers Tradition was a protected term that could be used for the cheese of purists like Guy Chambon, but they are in the tiny minority. The conflict was as much within the cheesemaking community as it was with any external regulator, between the producers who felt that traditional practices were an impediment to progress and those for whom the old methods were the defining feature of the cheese.

      With the public health officials demanding that they modernize their production practices, the producers of Salers faced a stark choice. If they adopted the equipment and methods of twenty-first-century cheesemaking, they would satisfy the authorities. However, abandoning the wooden gerles and joining the rest of the cheesemaking world in working with plastic and stainless steel would require them to buy commercial bacterial cultures to acidify their milk. Each gerle hosts its own unique microbial community that imparts a distinct flavor and personality to the cheese. Replace them, and the cheese would lose its heart: a standardized Salers would be no different from the semi-industrial Cantal churned out at a cheap price by large producers on the valley floor. For the tiny community of cheesemakers who were prepared to follow their cows twice a day into the fields to milk them and who depended on the premium price their cheeses commanded because of their uniqueness, this would be the end.

      Besieged and at the point of surrender, the Salers cheesemakers turned to their last best hope: Dr. Montel. Wiry and diminutive, Montel is an unlikely champion; with her diffident charm, she is more like a kindly French grandmother. Yet the government laboratory she directs at the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA) facility in nearby Aurillac has become the call of last resort for traditional cheesemakers facing existential crises. A microbiologist by training, Montel applies her skills to testing the hidden and underlying assumptions of modern hygiene. Are consumers less likely to get sick if all of the work surfaces and raw materials are sanitized? That, says Montel, is an interesting hypothesis. And like any hypothesis, it can be tested empirically.

      As they studied the microbial communities of the gerles and the raw milk they contained, the scientists in Montel’s lab came to a startling conclusion. Not only was the wood of properly prepared gerles teeming with microbial life, but it also actively resisted attempts to contaminate it with pathogens. So lively was the ecosystem that these natural starter factories inoculated fresh milk within seconds of contact; the porous wood was not just safe, it was actively beneficial. Moreover, the system required raw milk. When Montel’s team attempted to make successive batches in the wooden gerles with pasteurized milk, the communities of the biofilm changed. They soon became unbalanced, without the appropriate components for cheesemaking; somehow, the raw milk itself was keeping the communities stable.¹ With Montel’s results in hand, the Salers cheesemakers easily won their reprieve. For a group that had been prepared for a fight to the death, it was a comic deus ex machina. After just a few months of scrutiny, modern molecular methods and some straightforward experiments had demolished mainstream notions of effective sanitation.

      Salers was exceedingly lucky long before Montel and her team swooped in to save the day. By dint of its isolation and its avid consumer base, the cheese still had a continuous tradition left to save. But even a hundred years ago, it would hardly have seemed exceptional. Just like Salers, every cheese was once the product of its own indigenous microbial cultures, local breeds, and specialized knowledge. Today, the norm is industrial monoculture. DuPont, maker of the highly successful Danisco culture range, even boasts, Every third cheese obtains its well-defined flavor and texture from our leading cultures.² But what if Montel had a time machine as well as a DNA sequencer? What might she have been able to save? This is the story of what has been lost and how scientists, farmers, and cheesemakers are working together to reinvent the wheel.

      ONE

      ECOLOGIES

      For her advocacy of small producers and raw-milk cheese, Marie-Christine Montel has become a minor celebrity within the cheese world. Her research is an inspiration to a generation of technically curious cheesemakers: she is the cheese geek’s cheese geek. When American cheesemaker Mateo Kehler talks about the on-site laboratory that he and his brother Andy have set up at the Cellars at Jasper Hill in Vermont, he jokes that there is already a lab coat hanging up here with Marie-Christine’s name on it.

      So there was great excitement when Montel was invited to deliver a presentation on her work with the Salers producers and their gerles at the 2015 American Cheese Society conference in Providence, Rhode Island. The annual conference is the single largest gathering of North American cheesemakers, importers, and sellers. There are educational sessions, industry briefings, and plenty of swag. Delegates wear intricately color-coded badges to denote their status, with categories ranging from members of the press to senior attendees, who are labeled Aged to Perfection. At the 2015 meeting, twelve hundred people packed into the Rhode Island Convention Center to learn, gossip, and do business.

      When it came time for Montel’s presentation, a large audience crowded into the seminar room. But as they heard the tale of the gerles and saw the experimental data, they sat unmoved. The elegance of the microbiology, the revalorization of ancient cheesemaking techniques, and the implications for understanding and enhancing their own cheeses were lost on the crowd. Instead, in the question and answer session at the end, it became clear that the research on gerles had seemed irrelevant to the majority of the audience. What most people wanted was advice on potential pathogens and handling issues with public health officials.

      The audience had not been ready for her message, had not been primed for a world where microbial biodiversity could be the defining goal of good dairy farming. It was, said Montel afterward, as if she were from a different planet. It was true. She might as well have delivered a lecture on unicorn ranching. Despite our frustration, we could recognize and appreciate the concerns of the audience. Their problems were intimately familiar: this was the dairy world in which Bronwen’s family had lived for over a century.

      YOUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S HERD

      A decade earlier, amid the cocktail chatter at our wedding in London, two dairy industries collided. Many of our guests were Bronwen’s colleagues from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, a company that has come to emblematize the revival of British farmhouse cheese. Seated next to the company’s sales director was Bronwen’s uncle Eddie. We always thought of Eddie as a car enthusiast ex-NASA engineer, but he was also a farmer, fighting a last stand to maintain the viability of the California dairy that had been founded by Bronwen’s great-grandfather.

      At the time, Eddie’s farm in California was comfortably larger than any dairy operation in the United Kingdom. However, even with thousands of cattle, the farm was too small to prosper amid the vicissitudes of the American market for liquid milk. Despite milking high-yielding cows twenty-four hours a day, life was a struggle. But this was not a consequence of his poor management or lack of business savvy; rather, he was the prisoner of a market that was beyond his control.

      Bronwen’s great-grandfather, Fred Imsand, was a Swiss emigrant to California at the turn of the twentieth century. From a dairying family, he found work at a dairy while he romanced the chambermaids of San Francisco. He survived the 1906 earthquake by the simple expedient of standing in an empty lot during his milk-delivery run, and in the ensuing chaos he made his way to San Bernardino in Southern California, where through a combination of savings, resourcefulness, and gruff charm he acquired a farm of his own, Meadowbrook Dairy.

      The dairy of Fred’s era was diversified and complete. Beyond the cows and their milk, the family farmed chickens and pigs, smoked their own hams, and sold produce from their orchard. Yet Bronwen’s grandparents eventually rebelled against the unremitting toil of this system, embracing the progressive promise of scale, mechanization, and specialization. By the late 1950s, the dairy was a successful local business, with a fleet of milk trucks and—as the Inland Empire grew into Eisenhower-era suburban comfort—five little dairy drive-thrus.

      Fred had started out with a herd of twenty Holstein cows, but Bronwen’s grandfather Eddie Sr. recognized the direction that the milk market was going and made every effort to expand the business. In this environment, Bronwen’s mother’s involvement in the dairy as a young woman was restricted to some light bookkeeping as she studied for her medical school exams; a loathing for calves’ liver is the only legacy of her upbringing on a dairy farm.

      By the early 1970s, as supermarkets began to dominate retail sales, Eddie Sr. decided to concentrate solely on producing liquid milk and abandoned direct-to-consumer sales completely. With that decision came expansion: by the time Bronwen’s mother graduated from college, the herd numbered just under four hundred cows. It was ultimately a question of pragmatism, and decisions were made in order to survive. Eddie Sr. had spent a year studying at the University of California, Davis, in the 1930s before the worsening economic climate of the Great Depression demanded that he return to work on the farm, and at each stage of Meadowbrook Dairy’s expansion, he looked to the experts at UC Davis—one of the major American centers for industrial agricultural research—for advice. Each decision he made was based on progressive mainstream ideas about best practice.

      The pace at which Meadowbrook Dairy grew mirrors trends in dairy farming within the United States at large. We can see these changes reflected most starkly in US Department of Agriculture statistics. From 1970 to 2006, average herd size leapt from just 19 cows to 120 cows per farm. Hidden within the arithmetic mean is an even more significant change: small dairy farms are disappearing rapidly. The smallest class of farm, those with fewer than thirty cows, might still constitute nearly 30 percent of all dairy operations, but together this bottom third represents only 2 percent of all cows and 1 percent of milk production. In contrast, between 2000 and 2006, the number of farms with more than two thousand cows doubled. In 2006, almost a quarter of all milk production—and the majority in the western United States—took place at these megadairies.¹

      Europe is also seeing a steady consolidation of the dairy industry and growth of herd size. The number of registered dairy producers in the United Kingdom dropped by more than half from 1998 to 2013. From 2008/9 to 2012/13, the only UK dairy farms growing in size were those producing more than two million liters of milk a year; based on average milk yields, the average herd size of these farms was approximately three hundred cows.² With milk prices at historic lows, milk production at dairies with more than two thousand cows is becoming more widespread. Where the United States has led, Europe is following.

      Change came rapidly to Meadowbrook. A sudden series of family bereavements led to a swift generational succession, and in 1978, at age twenty-seven, Bronwen’s uncle Eddie took full responsibility. It was a tough time. The suburban expansion of San Bernardino was about to swallow the dairy, and strategic decisions had to be made. Again, the advice of the dairy extension program at UC Davis proved critical. Resisting a possible move to the San Joaquin Valley, Eddie relocated the entire operation fifty miles north across the San Gabriel Mountains to El Mirage. While the high desert did not afford lush pastures, a new five-hundred-acre alfalfa ranch provided vertical integration. The dairy’s systems were pared down for maximum efficiency, and an anaerobic digester was installed that converted manure into electricity. Again, scale increased. At its peak, the new operation was milking 2,200 cows, but life was still a struggle.

      For this most mainstream of dairies, there was no sense that processing the milk on the farm or attempting to produce a unique product could add anything to the sustainability of the operation. When family members talk about the dairy, their pride is palpable, but each commercial decision and each stage of growth is explained and rationalized as the inevitable consequence of market conditions. Over the more than thirty years Eddie spent running the farm, he was beaten down by a commodity market that he could not control. His is a common stoicism: Every farmer goes through periods of up and down; it’s a cyclic business as far as profit and loss go. It’s never been a business where you can count on a percentage of margin.

      The farm’s milk contract paid according to total solids—the number of pounds of butterfat and protein that the herd could produce—so the system was optimized for maximum production with maximum efficiency. In this model of dairy farming, controlling feed costs is everything, and Eddie was forced to become increasingly sophisticated at supplementing the silage and hay that he made himself with cheaply available commodity by-products. Technology helped. Eventually, it was simply a question of entering the details of the almond hulls, cottonseed, or citrus pulp into the computer to get the appropriate balance for a nutritionally optimized total mixed ration.

      To this extent, Meadowbrook Dairy was the diametric opposite of Guy Chambon’s operation. The entire conceit of Chambon’s Salers Tradition is to have cows who will thrive in a place where they will eat interesting food—hence the painstaking twice-daily milking in the pastures on the top of a mountain—and then let the cheese make itself, with a little help from the gerles. Uniqueness is fundamental. Taken together, these farming and cheesemaking practices, from the choice of the cussed and archaic Salers breed to the maintenance of the biodiversity of the mountainside pastures and the microbial biofilms on the wooden gerles, make for the production of something that could not be achieved anywhere else. In contrast, Meadowbrook Dairy tacitly accepted that their output would be blended with milk from many other sources and that the route toward commercial sustainability was through efficiency and growth. Instead of keeping cows in a place where they would eat interesting food, Meadowbrook kept its cows where space was cheap and then fed them carefully calculated inputs to keep costs down and yields up.

      When none of his children expressed any interest in dairy farming, Eddie ultimately took the opportunity to divest himself of the business. When we talk with him now, his sense of relief is clear, even if it is bittersweet: We ended up taking this as a time we could slow down and keep the [alfalfa] farm out in Inyokern, and we donated the land to the water district. It was an opportunity that comes along only once or twice in a lifetime.

      Although the cheesemakers attending Montel’s presentation at the American Cheese Society conference almost certainly operated on a smaller scale than thousand-cow dairies, the mentality with which Eddie worked would have been familiar to them. It is true in much of Europe as well, where the scale might be smaller still but the same pressures toward consolidation, volume, and efficiency are being felt. For Bronwen, this too is familiar. When she was a teenager, she and her family had managed, by following received notions of best practice, to domesticate industrial dairying.

      INDUSTRIAL WRIT SMALL

      Unlike her mother, Bronwen did not grow up on a dairy farm. Visits to her cousins at Meadowbrook Dairy brought exotic new experiences, like the opportunity to climb mountains of fuzzy cottonseed feed, but the dairy and its evolution registered only vaguely on her consciousness. Her parents settled several hours further south in eastern San Diego County, in the foothills of the Cuyamaca Mountains. With hot, dry summers and mild winters, the area was dominated by chaparral and horse fancy. Surrounded by equestrianism, Bronwen soon became obsessed by the desire to own a horse.

      And so as she began junior high school, Bronwen joined the local 4-H club along with her best friend Melody; it seemed more exciting than the Girl Scouts, and it would give her the chance to make a halter for the horse of her dreams. But Melody, whose family owned a billy goat called Buck Rogers, also convinced Bronwen to sign up for the dairy goat group. At the first meeting, she was exposed to the vision of baby goats frolicking in fresh straw, and all thoughts of horses were immediately banished. Bronwen’s parents recognized a modified win when they saw one, and within days a goat pen was being constructed in the backyard.

      When Bronwen’s parents, a musicologist and a physician, bought a house with land, they had no intention of dabbling in domestic dairying; they simply needed space where they could practice the violin without the neighbors complaining. Music loomed large in their lives—they had first met as teenagers playing in the same orchestra—and distance from other neighbors allowed assiduous practice to be combined with the odd hours of the work schedule at the hospital. While Bronwen’s mother had been raised on the dairy farm and her father’s family had dabbled in semisuburban farming when he was young, they had no firsthand knowledge of animal husbandry. Jerry Belanger’s book Raising Milk Goats the Modern Way (Garden Way Publishing, 1975) would be their homesteading bible.

      The goats, Natasha and Ginger, were to play a major role in the life of Bronwen’s family for the next six years. They grew into glossy, glorified pets, but a vague sense of paranoia surrounded their management. Their pen sat within a two-and-a-half acre goat smorgasbord packed with sumac, foxtails, eucalyptus, manzanita, and native sages. This type of Mediterranean scrubland is one of the classic environments for goat foraging, a way of exploiting marginal land that has been practiced for thousands of years.

      The goat book, however, suggested otherwise, claiming that a diet foraged from the native chaparral was poor in nutritional value and would lead to malnourished goats and problems with worms. The family deemed it much safer to buy in a mixture of hay, fermented alfalfa with molasses, and vitamin-enriched, grain-based goat chow for them to eat. In an area famous for its raging wildfires, with strict requirements for brush control, the goats looked on quizzically every summer as Bronwen’s father scoured the property with a weed whacker and the family raked and bagged up the fallen weeds to take to the local dump. Ironically, within the world of forestry management, goat grazing is now regarded as one of the most effective weed management solutions for fire prevention; it is also inexpensive, nontoxic, and nearly carbon neutral.³ At its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Google now uses goats for just this purpose.

      Then there was the question of sex. There was no mistaking when the goats came into heat: the sex-starved animals would stand on the big rock in the middle of the pen and bleat loudly and incessantly. Were it not for this habit, they would likely have been bred only a couple of times. But as it was, they got their way year after year. When it came time to breed them, they were loaded into the back of the family’s dusty Chevrolet Suburban and whisked off to the goat breeder’s for a quickie with the buck. Bronwen’s father remembers setting aside his Messiaen program notes on a day when the rest of the family was gone, the kids all at school, and driving the goat off to get nailed.

      When the baby goats arrived, the family kept the females or gave them to other members of the 4-H club who wished to found their own goat dynasties, but their sentimental approach to animal husbandry left them in a quandary when it came to the boys. The first set of kids were both, tragically, male. They were sent off at a tender age to eat grass in a friend’s backyard. Another male kid followed; we learned in researching this book that he ended up as the main course at a family friend’s Easter celebration. Had Bronwen known the truth at the time, she would have been beside herself, but it highlights a perennial problem for sentimental domestic dairy farmers: males. Unless you are prepared to eat them, they have no value. Bronwen’s reservations about eating her pets were not remarkable. When we talked with Jeannette Beranger, senior program manager for the Livestock Conservancy in the United States, it became clear that many sentimentalists dabble in homesteading with rare breeds. Beranger launched into an anecdote about an enthusiastic couple with whom she worked who could not bear to see any of their males killed or eaten. The couple had the capital to keep them, ultimately tending a separate paddock

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