The man hiking the world in search of rare cheeses

Trevor Warmedahl has spent years documenting rare and traditional cheesemaking methods, and believes that "cheese is an edible manifestation of a place".

Trevor Warmedahl was working as a commercial cheesemaker in Seattle when he realised he was using milk that came from animals he never saw. So, he quit his job and set off on what has become a global odyssey to discover places that still make cheese the old-fashioned way. 

In 2019 he arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and lived alone in a yurt with a dog as his companion. He soon discovered that dairy was sacred there: the women flicked milk into the air before cheesemaking, a gesture of respect called a milk libation. He visited homes where whey bubbled over central hearths and fresh, unripened byaslag cheese covered tables. After hiking to shrines, he noticed people offered dairy products as a symbol of purity.

As summer unfolded and city-dwellers migrated to the Mongolian steppe to farm, Warmedahl itched to join. He jumped on a Soviet-era coal-powered sleeper train for a rickety overnight ride across the Gobi Desert. On the journey back to Ulaanbaatar, he met a local who invited him to stay with her herder family on the Zavkhan grassland.

Warmedahl spent that summer waking before dawn to milk yaks, chasing livestock up the valley on horses, listening to shepherds' folk songs at sunset and cooking milk into dehydrated, sweet-and-sour curds called aaruul. The experience inspired him to seek out other places preserving rare cheesemaking traditions before they disappeared.

During the past six years, Warmedahl has hitched, hiked and driven through more than 20 countries, documenting traditional cheesemaking and pastoral lifestyles, and offering workshops on natural dairy processing. After recently completing a 193km (120-mile) cheese trek across the Peaks of the Balkans Trail, he shared with the BBC what cheesemaking reveals about a place.

You've been to so many places – Bulgaria, Pakistan, Italy, Austria, Cambodia. Share a standout adventure. 

Ancestral cheeses in Georgia have no analogues – I call them "fossil cheeses" because they were almost lost but are making a comeback as part of a broader post-Soviet cultural revival. My pinnacle moment happened in Tusheti, a mountain region bordering Russia near the tourist village of Omalo.

I showed up with vague directions to the shepherds' summer camp, which was deep in the valley. That's a theme: the cheeses I find are always far out, made by hermit types sticking to the old ways out of sheer stubbornness. It was drop-dead gorgeous, just me and my backpack. The valley ends on an abrupt cliff, with deteriorating medieval stone towers. Shepherds build their camps from the decay. I saw how these guys milked sheep by hand with wooden pails, rustic-style. It's a feta-like cheese called Tushuri guda, aged in inside-out sheepskins. At the end of the season, I walked about 130km (81 miles) back down the valley with them and 300 sheep. The herd has done this for generations – they know where to go. The shepherds just coordinated, and it created this crazy lawless feeling with dogs barking and me, chasing stray sheep down ravines.

At night we'd build a campfire and drink, and even with the language barrier, we'd relate through food. Sometimes language isn't needed. In cheesemaking, if two hearts want to connect, they'll find a way.

How is cheese and cheesemaking a reflection of a community's history and culture? 

Cheese is a sensory experience and embodies larger ideas about how we live. It represents how meaningful human cultures can be. At its best, cheese reflects this complex relationship between humans, landscapes, microbial life and livestock at a time [when] we've become so separate from how food is made. And the cultural element holds the constellation together. 

The cheeses I highlight represent an older mentality, with a sense of stewardship over the places we live and farm. So, a little bit more of the wildness of nature slips into the product. [Cheese is] an edible manifestation of place, of cultural history transformed into delicious food. 

Why is cheesemaking especially important today? 

The diversity and range of cheese is infinite. When animals eat, they transform grass and entire landscapes into milk that becomes cheese, and animals can graze [almost] anywhere. So, it's a lifestyle that can move in response to climate uncertainty and desertification – real challenges today.

The cheeses I focus on – natural farmstead cheeses [made exclusively with milk from a farmer's own animals] – reflect deep, ethical relationships between people and livestock and highlight the incredible diversity of heritage livestock. With industrialisation, that diversity is vanishing at an alarming rate. So pastoral cheesemaking strikes me as profoundly sustainable.

What can so-called "exotic cheeses" that challenge us reveal about a place? 

There's this greyish-brown cheese from Norway, gammelost, [covered in] moulds like fruit rot. It tastes like a musty cellar with bold, mouth-numbing spiciness. It wasn't for me. But deliciousness is cultural. It's taught. So, I always say: don't try something once, try it 10 times. Uncomfortable foods open doors. But be sure to eat them because you're interested in the culture, not because they're freaky to you.

One of the easiest ways to express interest in a culture is to say: feed me what you eat. When people realise you're genuine, the relationship deepens and you begin to understand their history through food. Funky cheeses become cultural emblems because of how obscure and special they are.

You set out on your global cheese journey without a real plan. What did this approach add to your experience?

Back then [in 2019], I was hopping on a whim from one volunteer gig to the next, drawn to remote places where people worked to protect and revitalise traditional cheeses. Workaway on farms, or staying for a while at guesthouses where cheese is made, are still amazing ways to go beyond tourism to see how people really live.

Cheese gives you access to a global community, like at [the Slow Food Cheese Festival in] Bra, Italy. But anything you can do to find that deeper experience – food, handicrafts – is worth it, even if you can't always plan in advance. If your heart is in the right place and you jump fully into adventure when it calls, the details will almost always work themselves out.  

What advice would you give fellow travellers about how to best experience unique cheeses abroad?

Find the cheese shop or cheesemonger that has the most local tilt and ask them which cheesemakers you can and should visit. Organising it yourself is cheaper. But there are also paid tours where you can experience a range of cheeses in a short period and really get to know a place. Just make sure that the cost actually supports local producers – that's what I call responsible "lacto-culinary" tourism.

How can other travellers seek out responsible agrotourism experiences?

Look for local cheesemakers and guides. It's also important to not expect farmers to sanitise things. It's normal to go to a farm and see broken-down equipment and mud. When we romanticise tradition, it encourages locals to put themselves in a museum. But tools [and] tradition have always evolved.

More like this:

• The elusive cheese with no recipe

• Is cheese the new reason to travel?

• The woman saving Georgia's lost cheeses

We need to be open to the fact that it's not all grandmas spinning wool on wheels outside stone cottages. Then it becomes kind of a show, and we're pushing farmers to become something they're not for tourists. 

What places have exciting, overlooked, or under-the-radar cheeses? Where are you keen to travel next?

Hands down, Turkey. It's a universe of cheese that doesn't get enough attention. Tulum peyniri is emblematic of pastoral lifestyles and the extreme sacrifice at the root of dairying and – I'd argue – life. That's because it's aged mainly in furry goatskins, so it looks insane because it can take on animal shapes. Somehow, I didn't think it would be delicious. How good can goatskin-aged cheese be, right? It was phenomenal. I was blown away by deep flavours and textures I'd never seen in cheese before.

Turkish cheese needs to be talked about alongside Western Europe. More remote places have just as many fascinating cheeses to preserve and celebrate.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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