Cheese people are the best people

Reflections on the Meeting of the Milkmaids

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Last year, I saw on Insta that some of my cheese friends had been to a gathering of women in the cheese industry on a bucolic farm. Instantly, I was flooded with envy and FOMO. This looked incredible. I wanted to be there!

I messaged the group and asked to be a part of it. A few months ago, I got a phone call asking me to speak at this year’s 2nd annual Meeting of the Milkmaids and I…well, if you know me, you probably know exactly how I responded. I cried.

I’ve been lucky enough to get to read, speak, present, and teach to some amazing groups of people. Students, from middle schoolers to graduate students. Readers and writers. Fellow travelers in eating disorder recovery. But women in cheese…this was a first. I immediately felt an enormous sense of both pride and pressure, because cheese people are my people. I wanted to deliver for them.

We gathered on the green rolling hills of High Lawn Farm in the Berkshires, which smelled of green grass and cow. The sun was shining; birds were chirping. We got to rub the prickly-soft space between the ears of just-born calves, and climb the spiral steps to the clock tower to look over an endless of expanse of green, speckled with cheerful yellow dandelions.

The group included people I knew and loved, and people I knew from online and met for the first time irl, and people I had never met before. There were cheese makers and cheesemongers, cheese microbiologists and affineurs, anthropologists and photographers. People had traveled from near and far. There were newbies and absolute cheese legends, like my fellow speaker Kate Arding from Talbott & Arding. Kate talked about tradition and innovation in cheese; she shared about her remarkable journey helping preserve historic British cheeses at Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, and then working to create a new cheese ecosystem through her work at Cowgirl Creamery. This is something that keeps inspiring me about cheese - the way it connects us to history, and yet is rooted in the now and in the future of our land and our communities.

I hemmed and hawed about what to say. I wasn’t going to teach this group anything about cheese, for example.

What I did have to offer - what we all have to offer - is our own stories. Our own perspectives, experiences, brains, and hearts. So I read a little from Plenty and shared about how I fell in love with cheese all these years ago. How the love has morphed and changed, but remained strong. How cheese saved me, shaped me, and made me who I am. And then I gave everyone else some time to write, and a chance to share their own stories.

“That was like cheese church,” somebody told me after. It certainly felt spiritual. People shared about growing up on dairy farms and being the weird farm kids, and then reconciling a whole new relationship with dairy as an adult. People shared about love and loss. Mental health. Financial hardships. Musical theater. Family legacy. The slog of PhD programs. Opening and closing shops. Feeling alone in the world, and then finding their tribe in cheese.

A sort of theme organically bubbled up during the day, which is community, which is that cheese people are truly, profoundly the best people. If I could bottle the generosity in the room, the passion, the care, the knowledge, the camaraderie, the love….

I’m trying my best to take it with me as I start this week.

Thank you to the Milkmaids!

Thank you to the cheese people!

xo,

Hannah

PS Do you want to write a book? Hannah Selinger and I are offering our book proposal workshop on Thursday. Get $25 off with promo code “FriendofHannah.”

Here I am presenting in this cool barn, with my books and my coffee.