Chances are, the last time you bought cheese, you didn’t ponder the ethical implications of your purchase. But American artisanal cheesemakers, many of whom went into the business for their own ethical reasons, are prompting consumers to consider such concerns... more
I could sooner live without chocolate than without cheese. I eat it every day: cheddar grated in my omelet, Gorgonzola crumbled on my salad, Brie-smothered crackers for an afternoon snack... more
Kosher cheeses claim a small portion of the overall cheese category, yet they have experienced a market growth of nearly 7 percent each year between 2004 and 2008... more
More and more people are getting turned on to cheese. Cheesemakers are popping up around the country. New cheese books are being published seemingly every week ... more
Last year's stock-market tumble punched a hole in Abbe Turner's bucket of goat milk -- the milk she hopes to turn into a successful cheese-making business ... more
The cheese aisle of your local supermarket is an unlikely place to study a classic political problem: How do we balance state power with individual freedom? ... more
The A.V. Club spoke with Cathy Strange about which buzzworthy cheeses are like the laptop-toting hip-hoppers and banjo-playing neo-folkies of this year’s festival... more
The men wearing green uniforms and tall rubber boots spread out across the compound, herding goats into pens, pouring grain into feeding troughs and serving as nursemaids to those giving birth ... more
Rogue Creamery leads the way in an unlikely revolution of culture -- growing numbers of American cheesemakers are exporting raw milk cheeses to Europe ... more
At this year's annual American Cheese Society competition... Hidden Springs Creamery of Westby, Wis., won six awards. Tasters may have been puzzled by how this cheesemaker emerged from nowhere. Just two years ago, Hidden Springs did not exist and its owner, Brenda Jensen, was working as a manager at a global packaging company ... more
The French like to say that “a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.” Cyclops phobia aside, I’ve never said no to the fromage. Ever. Ask the jeans I wore in Paris ... more
Wisconsin is staking claim to one of the world’s oldest, most distinctive styles of cheese, and this town — barely big enough to be on the map — is home to a world champion ... more
Kosher cheeses have seen dramatic growth during the past five years, says Rabbi Andrew Gordimer, who oversees dairy for the Orthodox Union, the nation's largest kosher-certifying agency ... more
The Taylor Farm is one of 34 on the Vermont Cheese Trail, a creation of the Vermont Cheese Council to promote a product for which the state is famous. The 34 cheese-makers in the group produce more than 150 farmstead and artisanal varieties ... more
It's a strange turn for a nation that for years judged its cheeses by how well they melt in the microwave. But suddenly the nation is being inundated by high-end cheeses that challenge the palate in ways industrial cheese couldn't dream ... more
Outsourcing in the artisanal cheese world? It may seem an unlikely course for a food niche so defined by its hands-on, back-to-the-farm ethic, but cheesemakers large and small are welcoming the opportunity to shift some of their burden ... more
On a cold January morning at Town Farm Dairy here, people steadily flowed into a tiny office, exchanging empties for bottles of fresh milk. About half of them headed to the right side of the cooler, where the raw milk is stored ... more
Massachusetts is among 28 states in which raw milk can be sold for human consumption, and in the past two years the number of dairies licensed to sell it here has gone from 12 to 23 ... more
I started wondering how easy it would be to find the unpasteurized, nonhomogenized milk in Washington, considering it's still banned in some states.
The answer: It's here, it's legal (within certain guidelines), and it's not even hard to find ... more
The Works are part of a growing group of established careerists who are stepping off their professional ladders to learn such skills as tending goats and decanting whey ... more
The Fosters are among a group of Maryland farmers who have turned to value-added agriculture, a catch-all term includes any method that increases the value of a farm’s harvest ... more
Hoping to head off regulation that might make their
products illegal, several prominent American dairies, including Redwood
Hill Farm in Sebastopol, have formed the Raw Milk Cheesemakers Association ... more
Mr. Durand is an icon in Camembert country. He claims to be the last dairy farmer in Normandy to be commercially making Camembert from hand-ladled unpasteurized milk. But Camembert purists like Mr. Durand are infuriated these days because two of France’s largest dairy producers want to change the rules ... more
For many, the mild, slightly nutty flavor of Gruyère is the perfect addition to a steaming bowl of French onion soup or a ham sandwich, but for the medieval peasants who first created it, the flavor was secondary to matters of survival and location ... more
Richard Hebron, 41, was driving along an anonymous stretch of highway near Ann Arbor, Mich., last October when state cops pulled him over, ordered him to put his hands on the hood of his mud-splattered truck and seized its contents: 453 gal. of milk ... more
Adam VanDen Bosch likes dairy farming, but not working with cows, so about four years ago he persuaded his father to switch the family dairy farm to one that milks goats ... more
In the last five years, the number of small artisanal operations in Vermont has doubled. The state now has 37 small cheesemaking farms, more per capita than any other state ... more
Like many dairy farmers faced with the increasing difficulty of making a small dairy profitable, Vic and Judy Jensen were facing a hard choice — sell out and end the rural lifestyle their family had enjoyed for generations, or think beyond the milk carton ... more
