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........

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