Cheese Making for Ecological Justice
Becoming a cheese maker in the local, raw food economy as a form of activism and resistance.
By Cameron Conklin
From Consumer to Producer
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From Consumer to Producer 〰️
Tomme Cheese made at Bramble Tail Homestead
This year I finally begun delving into a world I have been interested in for years:
cheese making!
And what I’ve realized is that cheese making can be so much more than just making cheese…
In this blog I want to talk about food systems through the eyes of cheese making. Specifically how this practice (when done the right way!) transforms from a simple food product into a way in which we can begin
localizing and de-centralizing our food systems.
creating closed loop consumables.
becoming producers in our economies rather than consumers.
These are all methods and strategies of resistance to capitalized, globalized and industrialized food economies that are depleting our ecosystems and senses of place. I see our cultural revolution relying heavily on the reversal of these systems in order to
regenerate our planet and communities.
We’ve been making cheese for a long time! It’s estimated 8-10,000 years!
many bio-regions have deep rooted relationships to cheese as a representation of their land, culture, and place.
Cheese is also an incredible fermentation process! A biological and chemical relationship
What fermentation processes come from your culture?
What’s the big deal about cheese? For me, it’s one of the most satisfying foods for me to enjoy. It tastes deeply delicious and is something I find nutrients and pleasure in.
What foods make you weak in the knees?
Why do we crave cheese?!
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Why do we crave cheese?! 〰️
****Fun fact, there is actually a compound in cheese made from casein (a protein) called beta-Casomorphine-7 that triggers opioid like activity in our brains. So it’s not a surprise cheese is such a beloved treat!****
BUT beyond it just being delicious, making cheese is also a great way to localize and decentralize my food systems! Cheese is something I consume all of the time, so learning to make it helps me become more self sufficient, learn the traditional ways of the art I love, and use my labor to support a regenerative version of that production cycle. This is a form of activism and resistance to normative power structures that I believe are hurting us. Making cheese for a small scale, regenerative dairy farm in my community is Activism!
This is what I want to share a bit about in this blog!
Just like so many of the foods we consume, cheese has become commercialized and industrialized. The advent of industrial cheese making dates back to the 1800’s and factory made cheese overtook traditional cheese making during WW2 and has since been the primary cheese production method. UGH!
We are now facing another challenging layer to industrial cheese making. Vegan cheeses are now becoming popular for health and environmental reasons. On the one hand, vegan cheese is creating an alternative cheese economy that avoids problematic grazing practices. Yet on the other, we are seeing products that were once made with 1 ingredient now have a huge list of ingredients that are difficult to trace and use a lot of energy to produce.
Have you ever looked at the ingredient list for a vegan cheese?
How and where are these ingredients made?
When I’ve asked myself these questions, I’ve felt surprised and unsettled by the laundry list of ingredients with words that I don’t understand. I feel concerned when I consider what it takes to make these ingredients. As a consumer, I am needing more efficacy in the origins and embedded energy in the food I eat.
Can we simplify and localize vegan dairy products too?!? Do you know any examples of folks doing this in your community?
BRING BACK SMALL SCALE FOOD PRODUCTION!
ITS OUR PAST AND OUR FUTURE!
A small exercise…
What would it look like if you didn’t go to the grocery store to get food?
Where would you go?
Do you know farmers or ranchers? Could they sell you food?
What would you eat?
What grows where you live? What animals are being raised where you live?
in other words…
What can you access?
I find the most satisfaction in a world where I have local and regional access to my food.
But so so so few of us have this opportunity!
This is a place where we see ecological justice and social justice intersect.
We all deserve to know where and how our food is being produced, and have access to land to produce our own food if we like! But many of us are completely stripped from food producers, having no direct access to food outside of a long, convoluted supply chain. This disproportionately effects BIPOC folks who have systematically been forced off and away from fertile land and land ownership.
How can we bring into the conversation and social ethos the question:
WHO fostered your food into being? And why is this important?
because FOOD IS LIFE!
The hands and the soil that grew my food, the life stream that goes inside of me and creates me, is me! The conditions in which this food was created melds into me, forming me.
I see such a deep rooted connection between our culture’s existential crisis regarding home, belonging, community and acceptance, and the disconnection we have from our food supply chains.
Who am I and what am I when I don’t know where my food comes from? As they say, I am what I eat !
Okay Cam, I get it. But how can we make a change?
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Okay Cam, I get it. But how can we make a change? 〰️
One example at a time
Now we get to the good stuff - how to do it right!
Below I get into my job making cheese at
Bramble Tail Homestead
A couple of the dairy cows grazing on the property at Bramble Tail in Sonoma County, California as we move into dry season.
Rotational grazing is an important practice for creating sustainable dairy products and is at the heart of regenerative food making with herding animals. If you aren’t aware, rotational grazing is a practice in which land is grazed in plots on rotation over a given amount of time. The graze pattern makes it so the animals are confined to a smaller space for a shorter amount of time, rather than a large space for a long time. This consolidates the nutrients and disruption the cows make on the land and gives each plot a complete break for recovery. It also results in the cows eating all the variety of grasses on the plot, including older growth, instead of just eating the new growth of their favorite variety. By doing this, it regenerates a more diverse prairie ecosystem faster, increasing the health and production of the prairie.
From milking in the morning to cheese making in the afternoon!
One of the most magical parts of making cheese here is knowing exactly where the milk is coming from. When I step into the creamery, the milk that I am using is 1. RAW and 2. has been milked from the cows on the property that day or the day before.
Why raw milk?
Raw milk is the original state from which cheese was intended to be made. Pasteurization changes the pH of milk, making it more acidic and more difficult to work with during cheese making. The proteins and fats are also damaged during that process, often requiring additives to coagulate and turn milk into cheese. Once milk is pasteurized, vital enzymes, probiotics, proteins, vitamins, minerals are nutrients are damaged or inhibited during pasteurization. Raw milk is said to be effective in treating allergies, infections, gut health and eczema. Click here for more information about raw milk.
Also, duh, it TASTES SO MUCH BETTER
Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to sell in the U.S., making it very difficult for most people to access. How do we fight back??
The awesome way that Bramble Tail gets around this, is by creating what is called a
Heard Share !
A heard share is a system where individuals or families buy in and own a portion of the heard! Yes, that’s right, you actually own let’s say, an 1/8 or 1/4 of a cow. When you own a farm animal, you have the legal right to what it produces. So voila! Raw milk (and all of the delicious things that come from it!)
A heard share is an incredible way to build and foster a localized, communal food system!
Making Cheese
There are so many cheeses. The cheese I have been focusing on is called a Tomme. A hard, aged cheese (6-8months) that has a delicious nutty flavor. I am not going to get into all the detailed specifics about how to make Tomme (holler at me if you want the dirty deets!), but I’ll share some pictures of the process and what it looks like to make cheese at a larger scale.
I make cheese in 15 gallon batches.
That’s a biggggg pot!
Not pictured is the hour of furious stirring that will happen once the cultures and rennet have been added and the curds and whey have separated.
Looking into the beautiful vortex of milk as I stir has become a meditative practice :)
Tomme uses both culture and rennet, but not all cheeses do! There are also so many different cultures you can use to manipulate the flavor of your cheese. The cultures we use come in a powder format. Cultures and rennet can be purchased easily online - and there are a lot of resources to help you choose the right culture for the cheese you want to make!
After the curds have formed, cooked, and dried out to the right consistency and pH in the pot, they are poured into molds as seen above. When you get all those lil curds into the molds, you begin weighting the cheese to drain out any remaining liquid. Once the cheese has fully drained, the cheese is salted (we use a salt bath) and then makes it’s way into the cheese cave to age (peek the last photo).
The Cheese Cave
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The Cheese Cave 〰️
The cheese cave is where we store our cheeses as they age.
Look at all of these cheeses in different stages of aging! The varying colors are clues to the amount of time each cheese has been growing a beautiful rind full of incredible bacteria.
Sweet multi-generational vibes!
My first cheese ! This is what it looks like now !
To wrap this up
if there is one new food you could learn how to make, what would it be?
How could making this food support your local food economy and build resilience in your food systems?
