Cheese as the essence of a place in time

Time at work. Jasper Hill Farm's aging cellars, Greensboro, Vermont.

Mateo Kehler and the Primordial Memory of Cheese

The Meaning of Your Life by Arthur C. Brooks has been embraced as a much needed remedy to America's biggest ailment: loss of community, meaning, and a devastatingly alarming rise of anxiety and depression amongst our youth — in numbers never seen before. This book, along with Plays Well with Others by Eric Barker, is only a fraction of a plethora of dialogue happening across all strata of our society: the paucity of meaning, and a growing chafing against the unshakable reality that modern western man is becoming an island — as early as his childhood years. Rather than a pastoral, redolent take into the remedy for this reality, both writers end their books with a bold call; the call to seek, build and find community; the call to be generous with one's time, resources, and forgiveness, as it's through the other that man can find meaning; the call to sit at the table of the feast of life with awe and gratitude.

The ancient awe of a Basque shepherd lifting a newly formed head of cheese to the sky — thanking God and animal for this life-sustaining gift — is an image Mateo Kehler knows well. It lives in his hands every day — in the cellars of Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, where he and his brother have spent a lifetime revealing the primordial memory of cheese as the center of our civilization and the center of our table. Mateo is someone who never stopped practicing the cure — the restoration of primordial man, and his return to a rhythmical life rooted, biologically and spiritually, in the land and in each other.

And then there is the cheese itself.

The grief of a calf separated from its mother, the microbes silently at work inside the abomasum, the slow alchemy of enzymes transforming this buttery essence into life-sustaining nourishment,

the seasons, the miracle of proteins into a freshly made wheel — and the wonder of its arrival on our table, creamy and alive, asking nothing of us except to slow down and, releasing the past and the future, to relish the present moment as it erupts in a mouthful of hand-crafted cheese, wrapped in bark, or cloth and cured into the womb of the earth.

Before we had even spoken, Mateo sent me a gift — a beautifully curated selection of Jasper Hill cheeses nestled in wood shavings, and tucked between the wheels, a hand-bound zine: A Dialogue on the Alchemy of Cheesemaking.

Jasper Hill Farm arrives at my door — Winnimere, Sherry Gray. Cloth-Bound Cabot, and a zine on the alchemy of cheesemaking

Our conversation was closer to four or five long conversations, distilled into something closer to a meditation than a profile — born of collective grief, the disorientation of the political climate, and a quiet need to return to work that is unambiguously life-affirming. I tasted the cheese. Then I called him at Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, where he raises a herd of Ayrshire cows, makes raw milk cheese in the tradition of the oldest pastoral cultures, and tends aging cellars that have become an anchor for the specialty cheese economy of an entire region. What follows is a record of the questions that opened him up — and what came through.

You call the cow our adopted mother. Who taught you to see her this way — and what did you have to unlearn first?

We are mammals, ultimately. And our relationship with milk is both primordial and — I believe cheese has been with us from the beginning of civilization. The moment we broke our contract with the wild and started cultivating plants and keeping livestock, milk was obviously a precious life-giving substance and source of protein.

Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom is home to challenging terrain that isn’t suited to industrial agriculture. Instead, it has historically been home to farms that are necessarily small-scale, independently operated, and focused on hearty, healthy herds.

But our capacity to digest milk is a recent adaptation — there is a mutation in the genome of dairy cultures that allows us to digest milk and lactose. But cheesemaking gave us the capacity to access this incredible source of nutrients and fundamentally changed our relationship with cows and goats and milk. They became such an incredible source of our nutrition.

The cheeses we started producing ten thousand years ago, they nourished us, and they have become a summation of a complete capture of the microbial life, the presence of animals on the landscape, and the footprint of the farmer, in a way that has created what we have come to understand as the pastoral idea — and in my opinion, pure human beauty.

The magic here — we look at alchemy as a form of transformation, which was pre-scientific method. The transformation of one substance into another. And in Aristotelian thinking, the addition of rennet in the vessel was an act of active dissemination, and the product of fertility itself is like a womb, and out of that womb comes the cheese.

Basque cheesemakers, when they are unfolding their cheese, they hold it up and present it to God like they are presenting their baby.

We have come to manifest a system that creates fertility at the soil level and causes grass to grow and the landscape to blossom, and the production of milk as a medium we use to explore ideas of time and the passing of seasons, and to mark the daily work of our lives, which transform us as well. It is the microbes at every step of the day that bring both the fermentation — and as we learn about it, the mystery that existed was pure magic. It's not diminished for us.

We have done whole genome analyses and we understand some of the invisible actors in our process and in our lives, but it's not any less miraculous. In a way, the way we have come to conceive of the cheese is a form of memory and a form of timekeeping. It's what animates and gives life. It's a life-forming path as it connects us to our own primordial past and to what makes us human. In a modern and industrialized food system, we are really looking backwards to our collective human past as a way of accessing meaning and connection and creating and manifesting the beauty of the world we see around us — in these cheeses that reflect who we are as people and the farming system that they reflect.

Their reflection of both a production system and an operating philosophy.

A culture. That's really what we are trying to build.

You write that a cheese is full of hidden secrets revealed by time. Are you a keeper of secrets, or one who reveals them?

Time reveals secrets. What I mean there is that cheese is a time capsule. And it contains all the light of the summer sun, which produces the forages that are fermented in the rumen of our cows. The milk is transformed by the skill and craft of the cheesemaker. They become the sum of the production on a landscape scale, because even in winter we feed forages that were produced at the peak of summer. If there is any imbalance — in the practice, in the process, in the equipment, in the starter culture, our inoculations, or in the technical execution of the cheesemaking process — those defects will be revealed by time as the cheese ripens.

On the other side, if we are grazing this spring's lush green grass and the rumen stability is good and our equipment is clean and the viability is strong and the starters are vibrant and lively and the execution is flawless — the expression of just beauty and joy and life and deliciousness as expressed in deliciousness — those secrets, their sum as expressed in the form of the cheese, that secret life just erupts in a burst of joy in your mouth.

I am just an actor, a participant in a process that is playing out in time, in the passing of seasons.

The cheese is revealing how well — or not, how balanced — myself, my teammates, and the entire farming system might be. It's about finding balance and creating it in a way that creates a pure expression without the static of too salty, too acid. If someone forgets to pull the cheese out of the brine, the cheese will tell you later.

 Winnimere is a raw winter milk soft-ripened cheese. The rich winter milk makes this cheese a true delicacy.

Tell me about the starter. What is it, exactly?

The way I think about it, it's like the seed of the cheese. What comes before the cheese — the starter and the rennet — for us are the precursors of cheese. They are the agents of alchemy, really. And in our system we have a process where every day we take away from the cheesemaking process and ferment it — that's like the soul of the cheese. It's the memory of all cheeses past. It's like the sum of all cheese batches summed up in this liquid, which we take and ferment for twenty-four hours at a quite warm temperature, so as to select the bacteria and the organisms that will cause future batches of cheese to be transformed.

And then we use the abomasum — the fourth stomach of the ruminant — to extract the enzyme which will coagulate the liquid to a solid. So every day we are making cheese, we are moving this microbiology forward in time. It's like the baby we are transforming.

A lot of people who do not live close to animal agriculture — there is a lot of microbial fermentation. The rennet enzyme cleaves a protein in milk and reverses the polarity of the protein so that it can aggregate instead of repelling each other. We started making cheese by looking at the ruminants — if you open the stomach of a ruminant, you will find cheese. It's the enzymes and the microbes in the lactic acid bacteria lining of the abomasum that have enabled us to make cheese for ten thousand years.

Now, in a sanitized food system divorced from the system that produces their food, this memory has been lost.

Staples of a gathering: a little charcuterie, pickled dilly beans, the show winner Whitney, Cabot Clothbound and a wheel of Willoughby.

You said that the main ingredient in your cheese is grief. What did you mean?

It's the sacrifice of the male young in the herd that are fundamental in the cheese process — you harvest the abomasum from the babies to make the rennet. Until very recently nobody drank milk. It was all made into cheese. This was a standard part of producing this incredible food that nourished us and sustained us. To actually harvest the abomasum from the babies. It's heartbreaking. We love our cows. We love the babies.

And yet they are fundamentally a part of a circle of life and death that happens, that can be summed up in the cheese.

The sacrifice of the young males in order to transform the mother's milk. The microbial life that we unleash during the cheesemaking process — and that life, these microbes that transform milk from a liquid into a solid, they all die. It's the process of death and dying that releases these microbes, and each of them is derived from a specific location, a biological cascade of life and death, the release of enzymes, cutting them into shorter and shorter amino acids that releases the aroma. The microbial diversity is linked into the microbial ecology of the entire farming system and the production of raw milk. It's life and death and the circle of life. And the process of making cheese becomes a meditation.

We are holding the grief of the world as we are ripened by this process of making cheese.

You chose Ayrshires — a Scottish breed from a hard county, made for thin grass and cold rain. What did you see in them that the rest of America had stopped seeing?

I learned about them when I was learning to make cheese, working at Neal's Yard Dairy — they select and mature sixty-five varieties of Irish and British cheeses. Their original shop was near Covent Garden in London. I knew of them before going to London. There was a burgeoning sheep cheesemaking movement in Vermont in the late nineties, and my first job making cheese was making a Vermont shepherd, Basque-styled, in the Iraty tradition. And it was through contact in the organization that was trying to build a network of Vermont shepherd cheesemakers that I heard about them. I knocked on their door on a Wednesday and they said no. I went back the second Wednesday. Then went back the third Wednesday. And they finally hired me to work in their cellar.

What are you actually selling, when someone opens a box of Jasper Hill cheese?

What we are actually offering is the opportunity for cheese lovers to connect with something that is deeply — a point of connection to something primordial, something that has echoes in our collective memory, in the joyous celebration.

When somebody receives a box of our cheese, many times, most of the time, we are at the center of a family celebration, a special moment with friends.

We are participating in creating the opportunity for joy and connection. And for our team and for myself personally, it's what I am seeking in my own life. The opportunity to connect to something that is deeply real.

There is not much left that is real.

Jasper Hill Farm is located in Greensboro, Vermont. Their cheeses are available through specialty retailers across the country.

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