Chasing the cheese Trail
In the early 2000s, I remember this marketing slogan “Happy cows make happy cheese”, advertising California as a premier cheese state for dairy products. It must have been effective because I still think about that ad every winter I drive the winding roads of Marin county, two months into a winter rainfall.
Emerald hills basked in weak light, MALT signs intermingling with roadside stands selling bbq oysters. It really is a happy place, and not just for cows.
My partner and I live in San Francisco, populated with many more people than cows, hillsides are less green and more multi-colored. Century-old homes adorned with decoration twinkle in the evening like any seaside city. San Francisco, for all of it’s flaws, is still a beautiful place, and has been a culinary hub for decades. One of it’s greatest perks is its proximity to so much biodiversity.
My favorite kind of Saturday is spent grabbing a dill Swiss biscuit from Kahnfections and driving through the redwoods to a coastal town for fresh oysters at Hog Island. Across the quiet highway you’ll find Straus Home Ranch, run by brother and sister, Michael and Vivien Straus. Both enthusiastic and legends in the industry of dairy farming.
Their mother, Ellen Straus, founded MALT alongside Phyllis Faber in 1980, and they had a “vision for Marin County [to become] a thriving and inclusive agricultural community in a healthy and diverse natural environment.” (malt.org) And the legacy continues with a new take on agriculture protection, through Vivien’s efforts with the California Cheese Trail. (Cheese)
The Cheese Trail is a list of all of the cheese makers in California and expanding. You can visit the website for detailed profiles of each farm, or you can pick up a brochure at shops and stores across California.
My partner and I stumbled upon the glossy cheesy map on a regular drive to Hog Island, and started to plan new roadtrips to father flung pockets of the state.
California cheese has long been a staple of the state, producing smooth and nutty cheeses that hold their own against the revered east coast dairies. The California Cheese Trail is a really great marketing tool, but it’s the kind of thing we need to be promoting. Over the last 70 years, California has lost 95% of its dairy farms. (Dairy cares) And Vivien Straus started the Trail to support cheese makers and local food systems.
She wants to help tell the stories of Dairy owners to keep these food systems alive - and it’s to our benefit that someone has gone to the trouble of logging these creameries.
My partner and I have made it our mission to visit every one we can manage — we even bought little cheese stickers that we use to mark off our map one by one as we visit each unique location.
We are also very competitive, and the Cheese Trail has driven us to compete so ferociously with two of our friends that someone recently asked me, “are you sure you all actually like each other?” It’s hard to understand a friendship based on cheese. But yes, that is what ours has become. Four friends who meticulously upkeep a four tab spreadsheet documenting every creamery in California.
Last I checked we were at 32 creameries and they were at 27, but who’s counting? It might seem like so many creameries would start to run together, it’s just cheese, right?
That’s the beauty of a state so big with so many micro-climates, each experience has it’s own personality.
Take Rocky Oaks cheese in Fresno California, you could lick ice cream off the floor of Margie’s milking room and it would be cleaner than my kitchen. Not only does she produce rich and deep flavored soft cheeses, but she pours love into her animals and her facility.
I spoke with the team at Pennyroyal Farm, a creamery tucked away in Boonville, Mendocino county. They love the Cheese Trail because it has “put them on the map.” Erica makes the cheese and Sarah makes the wine, but they use the same scientific process to approach both products, and that has made their cheeses perfect. It also means they offer a well rounded tasting experience.
Sit down on a warm summer’s day, you’ll hear the bee’s buzzing in their extensive gardens as you sip on a crisp Chardonnay. The team is friendly and passionate about their fair. My favorite cheese is the Velvet Sisters, an unctuous triple-cream Camembert-style cheese that melts just as the name implies. “The rounds are turned by hand and salted, and then allowed to dry before aging. The bloomy white rind produces a creamy texture and bold flavors of mushroom.” [sited]
Stepladder creamery is tucked tightly into the coastal range of the central coast. It’s cheeses as luxurious as Hearst castles interiors, which sits just miles away. I always pick up Moonstone, a Gruyère-style cheese, at the Clement farmers market. And you cannot pass up their cultured-butter, so fatty and sweet it will make any meal sing.
It’s not only creameries on the map, there are also dozens of amazing cheese shops with a spectrum of products from Istanbul to Mendocino. Take Brandon Wood’s shop, the Cheese Parlor, in Livermore; Brandon tells me that he fell in love with cheese because he loved punk rock, a segment of the music industry that is all about uplifting fellow punk artists. Brandon sees the California Cheese Trail as a symbol of camaraderie amongst producers and shop owners, just like the culture he found in punk.
“Are you sure you actually like each other?” I thought about this on a recent cheese-fueled road trip— we took off a Friday and drove from Concord to Salida, Avena to Fresno, Los Banos to Monterey and back again. As we sat in a TexMex restaurant in Fresno, digging into a chile relleno and fretting about the cooler in the car packed with five wedges and ice from the hotel ice maker, I wondered, has this gotten out of control?
Maybe to some, but for my partner, my friends, and myself - it taps into the camaraderie Brandon spoke about, a weirdly unique kind.
Vivien’s mission of promoting small agriculture and bringing awareness of the best of dairy practices, is working. Just like the legacy her mother started so many years ago with MALT.
Maybe you don’t eat dairy at all, but moving forward, as food of all kinds becomes harder to produce and harder to ship, we will want to know what options we have in our own back yard. We need diversity, we need small growers, and we need a little competition amongst friends to keep it happy. Just like those cows.
So if you find yourself driving through California, remember it’s more than beaches, celebrity smoothies, and sourdough. Type ‘creamery’ into your maps app and see where the road takes you. I’ll meet you there.
Krisi’s Little Friend
"When it comes to death, don't let me linger."
My little friend. I don’t know if that is a cliche when it comes to illness, but it’s what pops into my head every time I think about this new diagnosis. The truth is, there was never a time in my life that I didn’t have it - it’s always been a part of me - I just didn’t know it. I could have pursued knowing, but I just wasn’t ready. But now I know, variant c.2864A>G, also known as POLG, also known as mitochondrial myopathy. A disease I am very familiar with, it has been a part of our family story since I was small. Even though my dad had progressive symptoms that ate away at his muscles over time, I did not let myself consider that my issues were the same, at least not out loud, at least not often. I’ve always been weaker than most, always used my eyebrows to lift my eyelids, and more recently, believed my tired eyes were due to a bad glasses prescription.
But here I am now, and I cannot pretend anymore or ignore the reality that has always been true. I have the disease that slowly killed my dad. I am not invincible or immune. I am special in a way — I have won the rare genetic lotto. It was a 50/50 chance I’d get it, and the coin landed up.
What happens next? There is a lot of grief if I’m honest. I don’t like weakness, I don’t like pity, and I hate slowing down. My mind is always running faster than my feet, I’ve got plans and ambitions. I know how I want to live and how I want to retire. But the facts are, some things in life we don’t get to choose. Some things in life we don’t get to get out of, there are facts that cannot be cured or changed. So what do I do about it?
I always have a solution, its partially why I am good at my job. There is hardly a blocked road for me, I can find a way and I can do it myself. Or I thought I could.
A few weeks ago Eric and I were driving to the Pacific Northwest, one of our many long road trips, and a tiny pebble bounced up and dinged against the windshield. It left a crescent shaped crack in the glass. A local repairman said he could seal it with a blowtorch. Five days later the crack was two feet long.
Sometimes your shield cracks. Sometime you get a chip and a blowtorch won’t fix it. I am used to doing things at 2X speed. I like being busy and exploring my city and the world around me. But now I have to learn how to slow down, I have to be okay with sitting on the sidelines sometimes.
I have this deep fear of any activity being the last time I ever get to do that random thing. Like I remember my last cartwheel, it was July 4th weekend in 2016 and I pulled my hamstring. I don’t like thinking the thought “this could be the last time…” so I try to do everything I can, and feel like I can do anything I want. Climb Mount Whitney, maybe I never would, but don’t tell me I can’t. Become a chef in Antarctica? See ya ext Tuesday.
My dad’s world got smaller and smaller, one activity at a time. I am terrified of all the possibility I will miss out on, of all the exciting bites around the world I will never get to taste. I have an insatiable desire to move, and now I have to learn to sit still — just a little.
Life is far from over, but it will be different. There will always be a last time I go downhill skiing, or a last time I try to make stuffed squid. Maybe a few less backpacking trips, slower travel, quieter weekends.
The world is rich in the quiet spaces. I don’t need to be afraid of the stillness.
This will just be a little friend that lives with me for as long as I should live.