Cheese can be both rarified and common. It is also an industry that impacts and is impacted by climate change.
Today’s guest is author and cheese expert, Liz Thorpe. Liz is known for working her way up at New York City’s Murray’s Cheese shop, and taking it from a specialty shop to kiosks in Kroger stores across America, making cheese accessible and available to the American general public.
Today, Liz serves as Founder of The People’s Cheese, a platform designed to teach a broader market why cheese matters and how to make it part of everyday life. She is also the author of The Book of Cheeseand The Cheese Chronicles.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Liz joins Ross to explain how she pushes back against an elitist interpretation of cheese, and explores how the American desire for choice and innovation translates to the cheese market in the US.
Liz discusses how our industrialized food system contributes to climate change and describes how government subsidies and taxes often exacerbate the problem. Some cheeses are becoming more available, and others less. How many cheeses are going extinct due to climate change among other factors?!
Listen in for Liz’s insight on the mission-driven nature of cheesemaking and learn how you can take advantage of the explosion of great cheese produced in the US in the last fifteen years.
More from the show
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Liz’s Course at Stanford
The Book of Cheese: The Essential Guide to Discovering Cheeses You’ll Love by Liz Thorpe
The Cheese Chronicles: A Journey Through the Making and Selling of Cheese in America, From Field to Farm to Table by Liz Thorpe
Dan Saladino on Reversing Climate Change S3EP16
Paul Wagner on Reversing Climate Change S3EP10
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori and one of the co-founders here. Today I have with me Liz Thorpe. Liz started her career as a cheesemonger and is the author of The Cheese Chronicles and The Book of Cheese. Liz saw Murray’s from being a New York City cheese shop through its work with Kroger. And now you can see the cheese kiosk in basically every grocery store I ever go into ever. That was Liz. So it’s an amazing experience to have you here with me, Liz.
Liz Thorpe: Thank you. It’s great to be with you.
Ross Kenyon: It’s great to have you here. I don’t want to, well, I’m okay making you blush a little bit, I guess, but I think your involvement of taking cheese from something when I was a kid, you know, huge blocks of cheddar, that’s what I think about. But then once cheese became more and more accessible and thought of, I imagine it’s because of accessibility and through things like Murray’s being inside of normal grocery stores, I think you’ve probably had as much influence on how people eat cheese in the United States as anyone else.
Are you blushing quite hard? Is that even true? How should I say that?
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, I mean, I think it is true. And actually, what’s funny about it to me to hear you say it is that there was so much pushback about the choice to take Murray’s into a mainstream Midwestern-based supermarket chain. At the time, sort of like the prevailing vibe was that I was a sellout. And that really bothered me deeply because I felt like It’s not selling out to take something that is kind of rarefied, elite, expensive, inaccessible, and make it or try to make it available. That to me is sort of what you do when you love something and you want to proselytize, right?
You want to spread the gospel, whatever that gospel might be. You want to bring it to more people. And for me too, growing up, Cheese was like, Blocks of stuff and sliced Swiss at the deli counter. And I didn’t really understand what cheese could be until I was an adult living in New York City. Like that was the first time I saw different kinds of cheese from different places. So anyway, I feel like, yes, that is a great characterization of what that work was about. And but at the time, I definitely I was not feeling that love from a lot of people.
Ross Kenyon: Really funny to hear about, most because the choices available at Murray’s are not often substantively different from the ones I’ll find at even more specialized grocers. I got a lot of the cheeses that you recommended from De Laurenti, which is the Pike Place specialty importer in Seattle. Many of the cheeses are Murray’s. I’m like, oh yeah, I’ve seen that one a million times. That one’s there, that one’s there. They have some extra stuff, but it’s not like... How much of a sellout even were you? I mean, it seems like you just brought less accessible cheese to many more places.
Liz Thorpe: Well, I mean, I think the reality is that when you’re trying to change a food culture or a food landscape, you have to meet people where they are. And so it’s true that like the full selection of what sold really well in the West Village of Manhattan Wasn’t probably gonna do so great in Dayton, Ohio. But if you looked at our best-selling top 20 stuff that moved the needle in terms of volume and revenue, that was the same stuff that was gonna move the needle in Dayton, Ohio. It just wasn’t necessarily there or people didn’t understand how to take care of it or what to do with it.
So we definitely... The selection that went out to Kroger Supermarkets was not as deep and extensive as what we had in New York. But we also sold a ton of stuff to restaurants in New York that wasn’t going to be part of our consumer landscape in other parts of the country. So I think that we took the fundamentals of what mattered to a good cheese case and made sure that was there. And sure enough, when you go to any independent specialty store, you’re going to see that core selection because that’s it.
That’s the core... That’s the core of any good cheese shop. And then you can build on top of that, depending on your market.
Ross Kenyon: Some of your choices or the way you characterize certain types of cheeses strikes me as pushing it back against an elitist interpretation of cheese anyways, like your love of things like Havarti and table cheeses. That’s not a popular opinion, I imagine in your circles.
Liz Thorpe: I have felt like it’s not. I mean, maybe people and colleagues of mine in industry, people would be like, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. But no, I’ve always felt like I appreciate the basic stuff just as much as I appreciate the rarefied stuff. And I guess, I think everything has its place. For me, what’s really important is it’s not sort of if you’re making a pepper jack or you’re making a Bloomy rinded, mixed milk, buffalo, washed rind hybrid that you invented in the mountains of Bavaria. That doesn’t exist, by the way.
But to me, they’re both important. They both have their place. I think what I’m more focused on is kind of the sourcing, the people who make the cheese, the environment that it comes from. And when I wrote my first book, Which is the Cheese Chronicles. It’s all about American cheese and in my story and how I got into cheese, but it’s only focused on American cheesemakers. And there’s a whole chapter devoted to those cheeses that you’re mentioning, sort of like what I call factory cheeses, which are not sexy in the cheese world.
But there are these incredibly deep traditions in the U. S. in certain states that Traditions of production, multi-generational families that have been making these cheeses for hundreds of years, supporting family dairy farms in their local economy. That’s all part of it too. It’s just the consumer doesn’t necessarily think about that or see that when they pick up a piece of cheese and buy it. For me as an expert, it’s understanding which producers are... I would say doing it right, doing it thoughtfully, Doing in a way that supports a local economy and a local landscape versus those who are not, who are doing something that might be undermining or destructive or, you know, so like, but all those things are not visible when you just walk into the store and pick something up off the shelf.
Ross Kenyon: No, how could it be? I mean, you go into the wine section too. It’s an overwhelming experience. Even if you know varietals, you’re still like this specific producer, this sub region or sub domain. You’re like, I think about the people who live in a specific place. Yes. How they’re doing this, whether it’s pressed. And I like that it feels like it’s from a specific place and it’s not just a generic commodity. Although I can also respect there’s a place for commodity cheese too. Do I have to choose? There’s different functions available to each of these and can that not be okay as well?
Liz Thorpe: Right. Yeah. I mean, it can’t all be the most expensive bottle of grapes that were picked under the full moon, right? Like that’s awesome. But also like you want something to drink on Wednesday night or whatever. And cheese works the same way. Like what am I going to make a grilled cheese sandwich out of or just cheese toast when I’ve got nothing in my fridge? It may not be... The greatest specialist, rarest thing, but it’s, you can make a really fine piece of cheese toast out of it. So that’s got a place that’s important and valuable.
Ross Kenyon: There’s also, we had Dan Saladino on from Eating to Extinction. Have you read that book or come across it? Okay. So yeah, we talked about Stichelton and Solares. I was able to get Stichelton from Zingerman’s. They were able to mail that to me. I could not find Solares for anything. And it’s, and even your book.
Liz Thorpe: It’s really hard to find. Yeah, it’s, I mean, well, and this whole idea that like, if you want something to last, you have to consume it, right? If there’s no audience for it, if there’s no consumer for it, then no one’s going to make it. And Solaire’s is a perfect example for me of that in the cheese world. I mean, it’s a cheese, it’s a French cow’s milk cheese cheese. For people who haven’t heard of it, probably nearly everybody. It’s made in Auvergne in the center of France on the Massif Centrale.
It’s an example of... And it’s a cheese I’ve actually gone... I’ve gone there and watched it be made. I have spent the day there. If you want to talk about taking a teleporter back in time to another time, going to see Solaire’s be made is that experience. But it’s like a really hard cheese. Like it’s not a flavor. A lot of people, at least in the American market, like they eat and they’re like, I love this. It’s kind of like cheddar, but it’s moister than cheddar. And it’s got a real, it’s got a discernible sourness to it.
And it’s It’s weird. It’s a weird cheese. It’s not a cheese that I’m like, gosh, I wake up every day and want a piece of Solares. But if nobody buys that cheese, like it ain’t going to be here for much longer. And there are now, I mean, I don’t know exactly, but I think there may be four producers, five producers left making this cheese. It’s only produced seasonally. So it’s just, it’s dying. And after watching it be made, I understand why this is really hard work. But it’s like too cool to die.
I don’t know. Like just the idea that we would not have that makes me sad.
Ross Kenyon: You even have that in, the cheese book too. It’s like, might not be around in 50 years. If you want to try it now is your chance, which made me.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah. Definitely get it in France when, you know, if, if, if you’re there in the right season, but if you can find it, it’s like, yes, buy it just to buy it to support it. If, if you’re able to, you know. For food biodiversity purposes.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. Some of this does feel like time traveling where you imagine some of these territorial cheeses of England or something have been made for hundreds of years, at least broadly in a similar way. Industrialization changed some of those processes, but you hope that the core is still intact. Is it even possible for someone to just make a new type of cheese? How much room for invention is there? It almost seems like it shouldn’t be allowed to just develop a new cheese. Yeah.
Liz Thorpe: It’s a great question because actually I feel like every cheese is a new kind of cheese. What’s sort of weird and awesome to me about cheese is that broadly speaking, there’s like 10 steps to the cheese making process, 10 variables. And every cheese that’s made follows some combination of these 10 steps, right? Not every cheese uses all 10 of them. So like, it’s kind of like it’s essentially it’s all the same, right? There’s not that much variation, 10 steps, but every step can have infinitesimally small nuances of variation, the inputs going into the cheese, the milk.
What the animal has been fed, that all makes a difference. The outputs after you make the cheese, how it’s aged or matured, if it’s aged or matured, that all makes a difference. So every time you make a piece of cheese, it’s a slightly new recipe. And if you look at the American cheese world, it’s a great example of that. There are cheesemakers who make cheddar. There’s tonnes of people making blue cheese, but none of them are Stilton. None of them are Roquefort. None of them are Danish blue. I don’t know.
Like what are the famous blue cheeses? None of them are Gorgonzola. Some of them are called Gorgonzola, but none of them really are. So it’s like you can follow the same steps, but you don’t get the same output. And so I guess I sort of feel like every cheese is its own thing, which makes it overwhelming, but also very cool.
Ross Kenyon: But there’s a theoretical Bavarian cheesemaker who’s mixing milks. They could just develop something and name it and be like, I’ve come out with a new type of cheese that’s not being made anywhere else. This does happen. Surely it must.
Liz Thorpe: It’s called marketing. It happens all the time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Why do I have this in my head? That’s like, it almost, sometimes things feel like a caste system to me too, where you’re just like, is this fixed in time? You must adhere to denominational standards. And that’s just, I should release that it sounds like.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah. But I mean, if they weren’t, if there wasn’t some difference, like why does the world need it? Why would you buy it? It has to do something different for somebody or it’s got no audience. That being said, I am in my old age. I’m like, oh man, there’s too many cheeses on the market. Cause it does feel to me like, and the American market is really challenging that way because Americans like, we just want, we want choice and we want new. And so kind of responding to that demand, it’s a very different mentality in the food industry from like a European mentality where everybody is happy to have the same regional cheese they’ve literally had for 500 years that like, not the regional cheese of the town over, but this town’s regional cheese.
The American market is constantly like, you know, the media is always calling me saying like, what’s trendy? What’s on trend? And I’m like, every year we got to like come up with a new trend. So it does drive sort of like variation for the sake of variation, which is not necessarily like going to make you great cheese. Sometimes it might, but it feels a bit overwhelming right now. Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Was there a similar movement within cheese? We talked about this on the show before where within beer, there was a long desire to have it be the hoppiest, get those IBUs up, within wine to have big tannic reds that were like, this is not fun to drink. Why is this like hurts? It’s so astringent that my mouth hurts. There’s something like that in cheese too, where you’re like, it smells like a corpse and you’re going to want to die, but it’s like, and like, you were like the most like, yeah.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, I think that there’s... The fact of the matter is the stinkiest rankest thing is not likely to actually be very popular. It’s not likely to sell broadly in the US market. So I would not say that has been a real trend. But there’s definitely... I would say the market rewards a certain kind of flavor profile. I myself, as someone who commentates on cheese and flavor, I feel like in my own way, I have contributed to this because it’s a flavor that I enjoy eating. So I have talked about it in my writing and stuff.
But the US market rewards... A sweet caramelized flavor profile in cheese. And as a result, if you look at what’s happened in the production of Parmesan styles and cheddar styles in the last 10 years, there’s like a very discernible shift toward this flavor profile that is now really dominating some of the most popular styles of cheese that are sold in the American market. And so... I think what can be challenging about that is that you wind up with this hegemony of flavor where it’s like the market rewards this unusual sweetness in cheese.
So makers, especially larger makers, respond to that and begin making more of it and marketing it and promoting it and talking about cheese that tastes like a cross between Swiss and Parmesan or a cross between Parmesan and cheddar and sort of Sweet toasty flavor and really pushing that angle and people responded by more of it. And then you wind up boxing out all of these other flavors that are really, you know, might be more traditional or more characteristic of the style, but they don’t play to that trend. And that’s sort of that palette preference that people might naturally have.
That to me becomes challenging because then you just wind up with a lot of cheeses that all taste the same. And that’s definitely happened in the last 10 years with that aroma and flavor profile, for sure, with hard cow’s milk cheeses.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I mean, I certainly like those too. One of the first cheeses I really liked before I even thought about cheese was the three-year aged Gouda. Is it Gouda? How am I supposed to say it?
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I mean, I’m like, I always say like American, I say Gouda, but howda is like, I mean, a Dutch person would say that’s a terrible accent, but yeah, it’s howda is the more like the correct pronunciation. But yes, I grew up saying Gouda and I still say Gouda. But yeah, I would say that’s a great example of like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, those of us in specialty cheese were talking about sort of like, there’s this cheese that most Americans haven’t heard of, right? It’s aged Gouda.
It’s very different, like You might know Gouda from your youth. It’s sort of like a semi-soft, sort of squishy cheese. It’s got wax on the outside. Doesn’t taste like much, kind of milky, kind of mild. That’s the Gouda most of us know. But there’s this other Gouda that’s an aged Gouda that’s radically different. And it’s really awesome. And everybody who tastes it loves it. We were talking to the media about aged Gouda that way 15 years ago. And now... That flavor profile is really dominating a lot of the block cheeses that are made for the American market today.
Not Gouda, not Dutch cheeses, but again, like cheddars and Parmesan’s really being made to amp up that flavor profile. So it’s interesting because it does like, I feel like it starts with the artisanal, traditional, it starts with the chef, it starts with the cool product you’ve never heard of, but When that proves to be something people really like, the mass market picks up on it very quickly and starts to bastardize it or incorporate it would be the positive way to say that.
Ross Kenyon: That’s how you look at it, I guess. Well, as someone who can enjoy a butterscotchy cheese, maybe I should be getting some black cheddar in my life just to see for comparison now.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah. I mean, look for there are all these like hybrid cheddars on the market. Cheddar Swiss, cheddar Parmesan is going to give you that It’s not going to be exactly like an H. Gouda, but it’s definitely like it’s calling your name if you enjoy that flavor profile. And you make it. Cheese is chemistry. You can add things. You can add bacteria at the beginning of the cheese making process that live and they are there to break down proteins in a certain way to push forward certain aroma profiles when a cheese ages six months, eight months, nine months down the road.
It’s not a flavoring. It’s not like you’re adding peppercorn or parsley or dill or whatever. It’s literally a chemical process that you can predict will happen to make a cheese that’s going to taste more like white buttered toast or like caramel, caramelized milk flavors. And so it’s really kind of like, it’s like natural and very devious at the same time because you’re really... You’re making it be that way. Those are called adjunct cultures that you add at the beginning.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. Well, you recommended some really interesting cheese to me. Also, by the way, if you’re listening, I swear we’re gonna get the climate change. Let me just get out of like the cheese general stuff and we’re gonna get to the name of the cheese. I always do this with this show. I’m like, I’m really interested in this. And so I’m going to get someone to come hang out with me and talk about this. And eventually we’ll get to the climate stuff later downstream.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, it’ll come in the back door. We’ll get there.
Ross Kenyon: Eating cheese comes first where I’m from. But you recommended some cheeses too that seemingly don’t... I mean, some of them could have a more mass markety appeal, like the Quadrella de Bufala. I noticed in the book that you listed this as quite an intense flavor overall, but I was like, it was being quite unusual, but I didn’t experience it as being something that couldn’t like stand as a popular item. But some of these ones too, like, what is it? The Petite Vacherines?
Liz Thorpe: I’ve actually never had that cheese, but I can tell, I mean, I feel like you specifically said sort of what were some cheeses that were, I can’t remember how you worded it, but like, You had a specific ask and it was like, why are they more... What are some cheeses that are more unusual?
Ross Kenyon: Or what was your ask? If you’re listening to Liz’s book, The Book of Cheese is really fantastic and a terrific resource on this. I kind of wanted gateway cheeses too that were just basically... De Laurenti has some odder options in Seattle. And so I was like, What should I get up here? And you actually just wanted like some starters and some and some non starters, many of which I just found in the book, too. I’m like, oh, yeah, like Chollerhocker. Cool. This is this made the list is your preference in some cases for the intents of this variety.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, yeah, totally. And also for the story of the guy who makes it.
Ross Kenyon: So also that very, very intriguing. Yeah, that’s okay. Some of those are not meant to be like, is Monte Anabro this sort of like weird Spanish goat cheese? Is that gonna really take off as like a mainstream? No, I mean, I hope not.
Liz Thorpe: I don’t think so. It’s made by a single producer, you know, back to your comment about sort of like, can you invent a cheese? Actually, all three of those cheeses that you just mentioned, Or three of the four that you just mentioned, I picked them because they are sort of singular cheeses. No one had ever done what those cheesemakers chose to do. They kind of invented a cheese that was a mashup of a couple of different styles and techniques. And they created something that was really singular as a result of And in each case, they are the only producer of that cheese or of anything like that cheese.
And so inherently, I don’t think those cheeses are ever going to become available on every corner because they’re finite and limited. And that for me is part of what makes them special and worth finding and exciting when you do find them because it’s a chance to taste... This thing that like only one person creates and who knows how long that cheese is going to be around for. Maybe not that long.
Ross Kenyon: Dan Saladino and I got into this too, where you obviously need people to buy this thing to make it profitable, to continue doing it. But if it gets too popular, here’s some example. I think it was a tea in China that got so popular that it just, it became a commodity. People started cutting down the trees when they were way too young or just like harvesting too much. You’re like, well, something went astray here. It’s good that it’s popular. People want to preserve it, but It didn’t actually end up doing anything worthwhile.
It might, it might’ve even made it worse. Maybe it would have been better if it was just like a small regional thing that you had to go to the small province to know about.
Liz Thorpe: Right. Yeah. Cause then it’s like, there’s no threat of that kind of, of that explode, you know, inflation and eventual explosion happening. And then you wind up with nothing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Let’s get into some of this climate change business, or I can just ask you questions all day about cheese generally. Uh, Are certain cheeses being impacted by climate change already? Are some things becoming more prominent than they would otherwise have been? Are some things disappearing? I think we know that. Some things probably are disappearing or becoming less prominent. And that might be due to climate or some other reasons. But what is happening with cheese and climate broadly?
Liz Thorpe: Yes, to all of it. Well, that’s like a many layered question. So I guess I will start with sort of the most... I guess the biggest picture point for me about cheese and climate change, the way that our industrialized food system produces meat and dairy is detrimental to our existence and is absolutely very wealthy in a very well-documented fashion contributing to climate change. So when you think about cheese Confinement dairy operations where you have hundreds and thousands of cows that are in one place, that are inside, that are being fed a certain kind of diet.
The byproduct of that methane needs to be managed and is having a devastating impact on our environment. It’s really important for me to point out to people that is not how all cheese gets made. That is not how all meat gets made. I think it’s for me a really essential differentiator when thinking about how we want to vote with our dollars, vote with our diets. I am not a vegan. I’m not a vegetarian. But I try to be very thoughtful about where I get the meat that I get. And that kind of goes back to the comment I was making earlier about, I don’t care if you’re making a pepper jack Or you’re making some super rarefied crazy cheese that you invented.
I care about how that cheese fits into a landscape and an ecology and a community. And there are ways that cheese can fit in constructively. And there are ways that it can fit in destructively. It’s not the cheese. It’s the process of getting to the cheese. And there are a lot of producers here in the States that are really making a very conscious effort to farm in a certain way, to procure their milk in a certain way, and to have animals that are... Whether they’re animals that they own or animals whose milk they buy from a dairy farmer...
The sort of animal husbandry and feed and care of those animals is managed in a certain way that doesn’t have to be environmentally destructive. However, it’s a lot smaller scale, it’s a lot slower, and it’s a lot more expensive. And that’s problematic because, I mean, there’s sort of questions of access and you can make cheese cheaper because By cutting a lot of corners, having animals that eat grass that rotate from pasture to pasture where their manure has time to break down and contribute to the soil and the development of different grasses and flowers and chickens that come behind them.
And, you know, it’s like there are very integrated systems of farming that can be managed for years and years and years and can enrich plants. So, I mean, I think one of the things I wonder about is how and if the way we farm is going to change or the way that our government subsidizes farming might possibly change with an eye to those impacts. Like the subsidization system here versus the EU is, Really different. And the kinds of cheese making that are possible in the EU are possible because the government pays for them to be possible.
And they are much more integrated with the landscape and much less destructive, broadly speaking, than here in the US. But the reality is like those cheese makers could not do that on their own. They would not. They wouldn’t make enough money to support that way of cheese making and farming. So I’d like to think that maybe there’s some opportunity as we move forward to change how we support farming from a subsidization standpoint. And then to your question about sort of like, how is climate change or is climate change impacting cheese?
I think that yes, yes, it’s absolutely. I mean, I talk to producers all the time. The ability to grow feed is being impacted by too much rain or not enough rain. The cost of the cost of animal feed is being impacted. But I think also about the just kind of the sort of there are traditions in the world of cheese making that still really do exist, particularly in Europe. And I wonder how long those methods of farming will be able to continue because the weather’s changing. And I just don’t, I don’t know how much longer you’re going to be able to bring animals up into the Alps of France, Switzerland, Austria to graze in the summer if the grass is dead.
I mean, like I just, or the whole kind of like cycle of, it’s called transhumance. This is like this very traditional tradition. In mountainous areas of Central Europe, like bringing the animals out of the valleys up into the mountains so you can grow crops in the valleys and graze the animals up in the hills. And that led to the development of a very particular style of cheese making that we have dozens, hundreds of Alpine style cheeses that came out of this tradition and are still made following these traditions today. Maybe you won’t You used to have a very short growing season in the Valley and now the growing season is getting longer and longer.
And I don’t know where all that goes because it’s changing. It’s not gone away yet. And the truth of the matter is like, you could probably keep those cows down in the Valley and feed them grass and still make the cheese. I don’t, I’m not suggesting like, I think like all the cheese is going to disappear, but I mean, this like thousand, 1500 years of Optimization and tradition that has made these cheeses what they are and that goes away. You lose that. And so those are the kinds of things I think about most immediately when I think about climate change and cheeses.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot there.
Liz Thorpe: I think about cows because in the world of cheese, if you look sort of where cheese is made, traditionally marginal climates are the areas that tend to be producers of sheep and goat milk cheeses. Cows are actually pretty sensitive animals and they’re very sensitive to heat. And so I wonder as the climate warms, are there going to be regions that have been traditional regions for cow cheese production where the cows simply like thrive anymore? And what does that mean? And over time, do we start to see more sheep, I don’t know, being bred for Dairy production because they’re more durable and goats in hotter, drier climates.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a good point. I had a disturbing experience recently where I had a gardener come to my house, a very hip permacultural kind of thinker. And he told me that Seattle in the next 10 years is going to be much more Mediterranean. And I was like, You’re going to kill my nice English cottage vibe and I’m going to have to go to Southern California. Is the landscape correction really? It makes sense.
Liz Thorpe: That’s a pretty dramatic change from what we all think of Seattle.
Ross Kenyon: I know. I think we’re getting closer to that direction. The first part of your response to it very much with you. It’s the cliche here at this point. It’s the how, not the cow. How is the cow treated and raised? And obviously more regeneratively farmed. And even big players are making moves that way, trying to encourage people within their supply chains, trying to make those changes. Maybe it’s not happening nearly as fast as we’d like, but some of those things are happening. Although in many cases, you are right, the subsidy system Does not really aid that transition as much as we’d all really want to see.
I have been worried about the Alpine stuff though too, where if that environment like keeps creeping higher and higher, but there’s nowhere left for it to creep higher to, do you just no longer do Alpine grazed cows? Is that, I mean, you could like bring grass into them. Would it still be the same thing if they’re not eating Edelweiss or will even cows eat up there? I don’t know.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that’s, yeah, that’s what I was saying before. It’s like, I don’t think you actually like, Can’t feed cows and can’t make cheese. But the question becomes like, what are they eating and what impact does that have on the output? And so, you know, I think it’s important to understand with like with Alpine cheeses, historically speaking, you took the cows up into the mountains, not because that was the only place that grass grew, but because you wanted to farm that. In the valleys and you had a very short growing season, right?
So you had, you know, maybe from April to September to try to grow some crops that you could turn into food to store and you needed to get the animals out of the way. So you took them up into the hills and they could graze up there and you could milk them and make cheese up in these cheese making chalets and huts. So that was like originally why it happened. And that is not right. That is not the case today. The valleys are still farmed, but it’s not like all your food is coming from your little valley in Appenzell, Switzerland, or whatever.
That being said, the flip side of the coin is that the milk that an animal produces, that is the base for your cheese, is fueled by whatever that animal has eaten. And different diets, different inputs make for different milk. The milk tastes different. It has different fat and protein components. Percentages, Content. And it also, it has different microflora in it that can thrive in it that contribute the character of the cheese. And, you know, I sort of hear myself saying this and I think like, oh, it just sounds like so...
I could see how it sounds so unimportant what I’m saying, right? Like, I’m not saying like there will be no cheese, there will be no food, we will all starve. Like you will still be able to make cheese... It just seems terribly sad to me that you would lose that connection to the land that we kind of figured out how to bridge thousands of years ago. And we’ve been making cheese the same way in some of these regions in the Pyrenees. The basic cheese making recipe in the Pyrenees on the French-Spanish border has not changed in 7,000 years.
They’re making the same cheese they were making 7,000 years ago. It’s not that different. Solaire’s is another example. It’s We don’t have that many connections left that are that old and that much a part of our evolution from hunter-gatherers to agrarian societies. And that to me feels important, not to lose that. It’s not just about, do I have a piece of cheese?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t think cheese is going anywhere. But yeah, you have access to that uniquely... That unique, strange grassiness that exists in one high mountain valley in Switzerland or Northern Italy or something. You’re like, cool, that’s just no longer there. And it isn’t just climate change either. That’s changing. It sounds like in Solares, it sounds like no one wants to do the work because it’s labor intensive and they’d rather go move to Paris or something, you know?
Liz Thorpe: I mean, that’s true, actually. It’s interesting because we’re seeing a real decline of a lot of traditional European cheeses that were historically would have been like multi-generational. And we’re seeing a resurgence of that in the United States. We’re seeing young people who are opting in to farming, dairying, cheesemaking, who don’t come from that background, whose parents were not farmers, who have chosen to do that. I see this inverse... Relationship between what’s happening with cheese making in the US and what’s happening with cheese making in Europe and a lot of the really kind of innovative new cheeses that have come to the market.
And sorry, when I say innovative, I don’t mean in the like marketing sense, but like kind of new interpretations and new recipe development that have yielded really like fantastically delicious cheese that are coming from the US at this point. It’s not to say there’s not good cheese being made in Italy and in France and in the UK there is, but there’s a real like broad, huge kind of wave of fantastic cheeses that are being produced in the United States by young people who have opted into that lifestyle at the same time that their counterparts in Europe are often opting out.
And that is what’s happening with Solaris. And there’s just, it’s a ridiculous amount of work. It’s just grueling. Seven-day-a-week physical, repetitive work that apparently not a lot of people are lining up to do.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds like you have to have a real sense of mission to keep it alive. You talked about Neil’s Yard and some of these other people who are really involved and trying to preserve this. It is a mission. You must believe in... If this was just a job to you, why wouldn’t you quit?
Liz Thorpe: Yes. I’ve worked in Cheese for 22 years now. And... People are like, Oh, are you a cheesemaker? And I’m like, Nope, not a cheesemaker. Never been a cheesemaker. Never wanted to be a cheesemaker. Never going to be a cheesemaker. Like I don’t... Being a cheesemaker is... It is a mission. It’s a mission driven calling that has never... I have never been called. It is incredibly hard work. And not what I... It’s like work of a kind that I am not good at and don’t enjoy. So for me, it would be really a bad fit.
But the people I know who have chosen to do that, it is for them a calling. When I talk to them, they say, I just was never someone who’s going to sit at a desk or work at a computer. From the time I was a kid, I needed to be creating. I needed to be physical. I needed to be moving around outside. It had to be that. And they found cheese and that worked for them.
Ross Kenyon: I’m still kind of thunderstruck that you said that there’s good cheese in America, which I believe, but also seems like one of those things, too, where I remember growing up, American beer had a bad reputation, or I remember people thinking like Belgian and German. German beer was like the pinnacle. In many ways, it still is. But American beer had this renaissance. Also, probably parallel to cheese. It’s probably the same duration of time where now American beer easily compete. You go to Russian River or something. You’re like, cool. Not a lot is better than this in general.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is. I mean, I guess people still think Budweiser when they think American beer, maybe. But I think more and more people are like, oh, craft beer, craft beer. That’s a thing. I do feel like cheese is running, running a bit behind. I think people hear American cheese and they think like the floppy yellow slice. They think floppy, full stop. But, you know, they think like a craft American single. And we don’t realize that we make lots and lots of real cheese in this country. And even if people do realize that, just the breadth and the depth of what is being produced here is pretty staggering at this point.
Ross Kenyon: I love it both too. I love stepping back into history. I like knowing that there’s hundreds of years or longer within a cheese tradition from Europe that I’m able to experience. I think that’s really special. I love the strange funkiness you get out of that. But I also love the innovation that comes out of the United States too. Saying like, cool, like Point Reyes or Jasper Hill or like some of these like big producers. You’re like, it’s a really interesting cheese. I don’t know that I have something else like this and that’s great.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s delicious. And it’s like consistently delicious. You know, when I started in cheese, we bought American cheeses at Murray’s because, you know, we wanted to be nice, basically, but they were, they were not good and they were expensive. And, you know, but it was like, we wanted to try to support the effort. And then we would all like eat the European And, you know, it was probably 2005 before we really started, like there were a handful of American cheeses that were really good. That’s really changed in the last 10, 15 years.
I feel like there’s just been an explosion of great cheeses here. I mean, that’s the biggest thing I hear from people is just like the cost of feed, like the sort of unpredictability, like, will I be able to get what I need at a cost I can bear? Next year, two years from now, and just not knowing. Whereas 20 years ago, that wasn’t part of the calculus. Didn’t need to be part of the calculus.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Part of that’s climate. I’m sure part of it also is the ag supply chain and shortages of various types of grain right now, prices, inflation. Yeah, totally.
Liz Thorpe: I mean, the war in Ukraine has impacted cheese production.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. Surely. Yeah.
Liz Thorpe: But definitely, I think the ability to grow hay is something I hear makers talk about a lot. But other than that, I feel like those are the big things. That’s where I think you should definitely talk to a maker, like an Andy Keeler or somebody, because they’re in the weeds on it day in and day out.
Ross Kenyon: Liz, if there were misconceptions about cheese or you have a chance to communicate to a mixed audience of cheese lovers and maybe some cheese skeptics, what do you want them to know about cheese?
Liz Thorpe: Oh, man.
Ross Kenyon: Why even have a career in cheese, by the way? I feel like people take it for granted. Like, how do you? Why? Why cheese?
Liz Thorpe: Definitely. When I said I was like, maybe this could be my job. Everybody’s like, that’s not a job. There’s no job there. I mean, I think, okay, so the misconceptions I really like to try to tackle are around, I mean, this is where we started our conversations. They’re around ideas of elitism with cheese. I think it’s very frustrating to me that cheese in its historic origins is a peasant food. It is a food that was created and invented for people who couldn’t afford meat. So it is like the ultimate food for people who don’t have as much money as the next guy.
And yet I feel like in our current culture, it’s like fancy and like inaccessible and like what you eat with like wine. And it’s just not it doesn’t feel I don’t know. I guess then there’s like pizza and mac and cheese. And that feels like every person food, but a selection, a variety, different kinds of cheeses. Like I hate the idea that’s sort of elitist or not for everybody. And I do like to point out that when you buy cheese, it is expensive. If you walk into a shop that sells cheese by the pound...
Like a service cheese shop where there’s someone cutting it behind the counter, you know, it’s going to be 20 to $30 a pound. And I like to point out to people that you don’t eat a pound of it. Right. So.
Ross Kenyon: Speak for yourself, Liz.
Liz Thorpe: You might.
Ross Kenyon: My road for budget is high. I just, once I start, it’s bad.
Liz Thorpe: But I guess I just like to point out to people that you can get a piece of it. You don’t have to get the whole thing. And that can be a point of entry that feels a little bit more manageable for trying different things. Also, I think of cheese as a meat substitute. I mean, we eat cheese in my house as a meal. We also eat it for appetizers and as an ingredient. But we will just have cheese and bread and a salad and that will be our dinner. So yeah, I will spend more money on my cheese in that context because if I were making a pot roast or whatever, that would be my main protein.
So I just... I don’t know. I just... I also want people to understand that cheese costs what it does because it’s expensive to make. And that when you buy cheese from small producers that you haven’t really heard of... You’re buying all the inputs that got you to the cheese, the animals, the farming, the making, the aging. And it’s a very, very, very manual process. And every time hands touch that process, you know, it builds cost in. So I just I like people to know all that.
Ross Kenyon: I found it really funny that you use it as a meat substitute because I don’t know that happens. Especially, I could see if that was a thing where maybe it was like a government cheese, like a welfare scenario. I could see that playing out.
Liz Thorpe: Like a World War II situation?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, or there’s a rationing thing. Yeah, but I don’t know of any people who are able to afford meat. I think meat is also probably artificially inexpensive anyways.
Liz Thorpe: Oh God, meat is so subsidized. Chicken does not cost $2 a pound. It’s not what it actually costs. So I guess that... Sorry. Yeah. That’s the other... I mean, I talked about subsidies, but it’s like cheese doesn’t get the benefit of all that subsidization. If people had to pay what their hamburger actually costs or what their chicken actually costs, they would not eat as much hamburger and chicken. It is vastly heavily subsidized. But when you buy a piece of cheese, that’s what it costs. To make it, you’re not really this artisanal cheese makers are not getting subsidization.
So it makes it more expensive relative to meat, but it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
Ross Kenyon: Seems like some of it is favorable or disfavorable tax status too. I think I saw there’s a hundred percent import duty on Roquefort almost specifically to it, which was a personal fave. That was the first cheese I had as a grownup where I was like, what? That was like my first, yours is a poise, right? That was your, is that how you say it? Yeah, yeah, That was your cheese. I had a really good, I need to find it first and I very much want to try it. You described it as porky.
Anyways, I’m getting away from the main thread here. Roquefort was the one where I tried it. I was like, oh, I get why people like blue cheese. This is so complex. There’s salt crystals. By the way, anything with salt crystals, that’s why I like aged Gouda or cheddar with it. You’re in on that. Yeah. And I love the crystals on it.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah. That’s another great point. Like on imports, there are all these duties that are not universally applicable. So different milk types from different countries get charged different duty rates, which is like the amount of money that it’s like the tax to bring it into the country. And the duties can double the cost of a cheese just for the privilege of walking in the door to the United States. So there’s all this like economic... String pulling, puppeteering behind the scenes that impact like what you actually pay at the store.
Ross Kenyon: And surely eating cheese, well, as I say, it’s better for the animal. Obviously, it’s better for the animal. Some dairy operations are certainly no kinder than the meat operations. But especially at these smaller producers, I imagine they’re living good grass fed lives. It seems like you shouldn’t artificially make them more expensive than they would need to be by tax.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah. I mean, it’s really the milk operations that get super sketchy. Even bigger cheese makers are really... I mean, you’d be amazed. There’s another misconception I would like to unpack for people. You would be amazed how even some of the biggest... Cheese brands, makers, to put it in a supermarket context, like the cheese that you buy over on the dairy wall with the milk and the eggs and the butter, as opposed to the fancy cheese you buy in the deli section over by the sliced meats. How much the cheese on the dairy wall is still coming from milk from relatively small family-owned farms?
Yeah. It’s really like even the biggest brands are often buying from... Wisconsin is a great example of that, the state of Wisconsin. There’s just a lot of... They’re buying from smaller family dairy farms. So yeah, I feel like cheese and milk product, like fluid milk are really different in that way.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. I see. I think for many of these cheesemakers too, it’s probably vertically integrated and they’re doing the milking too. They’re not acquiring them. Yeah, right. That’s all part of the same operation.
Liz Thorpe: Bigger ones tend not to be vertically integrated. They tend to just buy and produce. But the smaller ones, many of them are.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Liz, is there any place you want to send people to? Obviously, you have a website, the Book of Cheese. Yeah, it’s a great resource. You should pick it up.
Liz Thorpe: Hopefully outdated. So you can go there. But it’s... Yeah, I mean, I’m sort of like a hermit, Ross. I kind of... I like to pull cheese strings behind the curtain, but I’m like, I don’t know where I would send people. I mean, buy my book if you’re interested in learning more about cheese. I guess that’s the plug I would give myself. But yeah, I do Instagram, but I don’t really like social media. So I don’t do very much. And I teach a class at Stanford. So if you want to take a hardcore class on cheese that’s seven weeks long, you can do that through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Department.
I’m very nerdy. I’m the nerd of the cheese world.
Ross Kenyon: Nerd of the cheese world.
Liz Thorpe: I’m not like, I’m not the influencer. I’m the like, the nerd. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I guess if you can trust your book with something like cheese, sex, death, I can definitely see there’s a little bit of a, of a gap.
Liz Thorpe: Yeah, totally. And I’m like, those women are awesome. And I’m like, they’ve built businesses out of that. And it’s fantastic. And I’m just like, Ooh, that seems like, it’s like, I can’t even take a picture on my iPhone. So yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I also don’t like doing that stuff either. I feel you. Well, Liz, thank you so much for being here.
Liz Thorpe: Oh, it’s my pleasure. And I’m sure we will. I hope we will talk again.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed talking about cheese and climate change, but mostly cheese. If you like what we’re doing here, please give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share it with a friend. And thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.
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