The return of Milkfed

Chronicling my cheese & climate research

Illustration by Malachy Egan

When I let this newsletter go fallow over the summer, it was only supposed to be for a few weeks. I spent the spring attempting to purchase the house here in Philly that I had been renting since the start of 2023—and in June, at the last minute, that deal fell through. 

Anyone who has purchased a home, especially in the 2020s, can tell you how it takes over your life, and in my case, occasioned no fewer than three emotional breakdowns. Anyone who hasn’t will tell you how boring it is to hear about another person’s Journey to Homeownership, so here’s a quick recap: we found another house and bought it and it was fine!

Then we had to pack and move and unpack. Work picked up in a serious way, and there was no space in my brain or in my schedule to think and write about cheese for free in ways I wasn’t already thinking and writing about it for money. Suddenly, November was almost over, and I still hadn’t nudged this newsletter from its long summer slumber. 

Plus, there’s more (old) news from around that time. I received the 2023 Daphne Zepos Research Award for a project on the connections between cheese and climate change. You can read my application—written in the form of a vision looking back from 2026 on my many accomplishments—here. 

The goals of my research are:

• to understand how dairy farming and cheese production contribute to carbon emissions and other environmental challenges

• to learn how climate change is affecting cheese producers and dairy farmers, and

• to share actionable steps that producers at different scales can take to mitigate their climate impact and make their operations more resilient.

For the past two months, I’ve been interviewing farmers, cheesemakers, climate consultants, legal scholars, historians, and more for my DZRA project via phone calls and Zoom sessions. It’s a testament to the legacy of Daphne Zepos—a chef, educator, writer, consultant, and cheese judge who helped found iconic importer Essex St. Cheese and once owned the Cheese School of San Francisco—that some of the best-known experts I’ve interviewed have begun or ended our conversations by invoking her memory. I’m proud to carry on this research, which will be presented for both industry and popular audiences in different forms, in her name. 

But the $2500 in grant funds that come with the award are ostensibly for travel, and I’m super excited to embark on my first research trip in exactly one week. I’ll be heading to Puerto Rico, where dairy farmers and academics have been conducting research on vacas pelonas, also known as slick cows. 

I’m incredibly lucky to have reconnected this spring with Katherine Rapin, a climate journalist colleague in Puerto Rico who has done some of the only English-language reporting I’ve seen on vacas pelonas there (read over at Ambrook Research). We’ll be visiting farmers, breeders, and university researchers on the west side of the island and connecting with as many cheesemakers as we can. We’ve found several but welcome any tips or intros. 

Farmers in Puerto Rico have been breeding these Criollo cattle—animals descended from the first cows brought over to the Americas by Spanish colonizers more than 500 years ago and naturalized to the tropical climate—for generations to maximize a natural mutation for thermoresistance. With a lighter, thinner coat, vacas pelonas are much more tolerant of the Caribbean’s hot, humid weather. The mainland dairy industry has started to take notice, with an eye to incorporating slick cow genetics into the US dairy herd as extreme heat becomes the norm in many of the country’s milk-producing regions. 

I’m also eager to learn from folks doing this work firsthand because Puerto Rico is one of the most climate-vulnerable places in the US where dairying is significant—in fact, it’s the largest agricultural sector on the island as of 2018. Dairy producers there had to manage record-breaking temps of up to 115 degrees during this past summer’s heat wave, and breeding slick cows is just one tactic they’ll need to sustain their businesses and keep their workers, animals, and lands healthy.

I’ll be heading to other regions of the country where climate-related extremes and weather events are changing the nature of dairy farming and cheesemaking in the new year. But Puerto Rico is unique in that it’s a colony of the United States—not a sovereign nation or a US state. That 500-year history of colonization has shaped what’s grown, imported, exported, and eaten on the island, including dairy and cheese. (Gratitude for the work of Alicia Kennedy, who has written extensively on food, farming, climate change, and colonialism in Puerto Rico through the lens of her life in San Juan.)

To be clear, dairying anywhere in the Americas is the result of colonialism. Putting dairy farming in Puerto Rico in that historical and cultural context presents a natural entry point to tie colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy into my project, and these forces—surprise—have something to do with our global climate crisis. I want to make to make my research as accessible and actionable as possible for a cheese industry audience, and finding stories, people, and examples from within the industry that tie into these larger concepts feels like one of the most effective ways to do that.

If you’d like to follow along, I’ll be sharing snippets from my travels over on Instagram starting next week, plus a recap here once I’m back home in mid-December. There will be more to come from my DZRA research in the new year. 

Recent Work

I spoke with several experts, ranging from cookbook authors to cheesemakers to distributors, to answer this question over at Epicurious: Is It Okay to Freeze Cheese?

I also enjoyed being interviewed about my work, creative life, recent reads, and climate grief with historian and fermenter Julia Skinner over at Root Kitchens earlier this month.