Keeping it Natural

A Conversation with Parish Hill Creamery

YOU MAY BE FAMILIAR with the natural wine craze sweeping the world, but have you ever heard of natural cheese? Parish Hill Creamery, located in southern Vermont sure has. The owners, husband and wife duo of cheesemaking rockstars, Peter Dixon and Rachel Fritz Schaal, are leading the force behind natural cheesemaking here in the US. With over 50 years of cheese experience under their belts, Peter and Rachel have seen and done it all and make sure that their cheese diverges from the norm. Parish Hill cheeses are unlike any other in the US, using raw milk from a neighboring dairy, sea salt hand-harvested from the Atlantic, and starter cultures made from scratch. Their cheese has been awarded at both the World Cheese Awards and American Cheese Society conferences, and their work to preserve traditional cheesemaking practices has been recognized by Slow Food International. We were lucky to sit down with Peter and Rachel to chat about their cheese and how COVID has changed the game for cheesemakers.

L: You two are the coolest cheesemakers in the United States, hands down, and you’ve got some impressive years of experience under your belt. When was it you first fell in love with cheese?

R: I always loved cheese. In fact, when my best friend and I moved out to San Francisco at age 19, we would go to the Rainbow Grocery to buy like, bulk Bulgarian feta. We thought we were so grown up and cool. Later, when I was working at an organic vineyard in Sonoma County, I made friends with some guys down the road who had started a small goat cheese business. We would barter and drink wine and share stories. At the time, I thought I knew so much about cheese, because I was hanging out with them, but it turns out, I didn't know jack shit. And then fast forward to meeting Peter Dixon, and I fell in love with him, and that sort of meant—

P: You had to fall in love with it. 

R: And also just learning so much. Like I said, I thought I knew so much, wherein I didn't know anything. Just hanging around Peter and being at classes where he was teaching, in fact, was when I actually fell in love with him. I was in awe of the mystery and the magic. Taking this beautiful milk, but then bringing it down to its elements and nurturing it along, turning it into not just sustenance, but something magnificent.

P: For me, we moved to Vermont when I was 10. I imagine before that, the cheese that I was eating wasn't very interesting or special, but when we moved up here, all of a sudden there were wheels of real cheddar in those country stores. They would cut off a big wedge, and when I tasted it, I thought “Wow, that cheese really had some flavor!” Then came the family cow and my mother's first cheesemaking efforts. The family joke was that she was making some kind of “aged cheddar-type cheese" that never aged long because we usually ate all the curds before it came time to make the cheese. But the memory there is the aroma of the raw milk curds, you know, that special aroma that you can only get from milk when it's raw, wafting off the curds as we made the cheese. At this point, my love affair is centered around the traditional, natural approach to making cheese—the idea that this is the way they made cheese 100, 200 years ago—let's do that. And that was our approach at Parish Hill Creamery, and it was a big risk, because nobody in the US makes cheese like us.

L: Can you tell me a bit more about natural cheesemaking? I know that cheese is made of milk, salt, bacterial cultures, and a coagulant called rennet, but what exactly makes certain cheeses natural?

P:  Natural cheesemaking is a traditional approach to making cheese, which means that you're trying to minimize your inputs, which have to be identified as the most locally-sourced as you can do. By that regard, you have to make your cheese from raw milk*. There's no wiggle room there. Then, you have to make your own starter cultures from scratch, whereas 99% of cheesemakers globally get theirs from a manufactured packet they dump into the vat. The salt that we use is from a small company in Maine that makes salt by hand from the Atlantic, and the rennet has to be one you can make yourself, either animal, like calf or kid, or plant-based, like a thistle or a fig leaf. There's no wiggle room there either. 

It’s rare in the US, but it's not unique if you're in Italy, for example. That's where my love affair with cheese really bloomed big time, because I was surrounded by this tribe—I call them my tribe—of natural cheesemakers where that's what they do every day. That's what their parents have done. That's what their heritage is. It really blew my mind just to be in that milieu for the first time because you don't get that here, but we're trying to create it here through our methods

*Raw milk is not fully legal for sale in all US states, and the production in states that do allow for raw milk sale is highly regulated to ensure it’s safely handled. Check out Raw Milk Nation to see if raw milk is legal in your area.

L: You both talk about the “magic” qualities of handmade cheese—and it’s tangible when eating your cheese but also when visiting you folks to make it, or even just hearing you talk about it. It's something that fills the whole room and you just feel it. What do you think makes that magic?

R: I think that natural cheesemaking methods and the energy around it are exciting. It gets people's attention, whether it's just flavor or the actual preservation of traditional ways and traditional foods. There is so little in our food culture today that truly harkens back. So much of what we eat has been processed and even if it hasn't been processed, it's been trucked, or mono-cultured. It is exciting to people because of a feeling of the loss of that.

P: It's really about two things that I can think of right away. One is the anticipation of what it's going to taste like—that anticipation of "I wonder what the land is going to throw out this year as the cows synthesize the milk from eating those plants on that pasture?" And we've certainly noticed differences in the years we've made cheese at Parish Hill. The second is getting more at what Rachel was talking about. It's exciting to have a challenge, I really thrive on that, and the challenge here was exactly that of finding quality milk and putting together the pieces over a period of time to make cheese the way it’s still made in many parts of the world—just not in the US. 

L: Cheese is very much about the community, from bartering at farmers’ markets, to the relationships between farms, cheesemakers, distributors, and mongers—how have you seen COVID-19 affect the community?

P: For cheesemakers like us that are so specialized, it's been very detrimental because people can't go out and taste our cheese anymore. For distributors, we handpicked a New York one and an LA one, and their main business had been restaurants. When COVID hit, we immediately lost well over half of our ability to sell cheese, so we’ve had to reevaluate the way we're going to go ahead. I think it's important for cheesemakers who are struggling to slowly find new ways to sell their cheese in their own region. I think that's what's changing: it's very much going to be oriented towards selling cheese in your region versus all over the United States. Part of that has to do with the success that will come about through consumers saying, "Well, you know what, these cheese makers in New England need me to buy their cheese, I'm not gonna buy Wisconsin cheese anymore, even though that was my favorite cheese. This cheese here is pretty close to that, so I'm going to buy it more often." So I think that has to shift as well, otherwise some of us will go out of business. 

R: COVID has had a profound influence on people's lives and livelihoods, cheesemakers being just one example of an industry that has radically shifted because our lives are different. Going forward, we have to figure out how to shift in order to stay. How do we get our message out and how do we get our cheese out and purchased and eaten? A couple of things have happened, and they are all in conjunction with the storm that was COVID followed by Black Lives Matter—this was a time when people were at home and had the opportunity to really pay attention to the things that were going on in the world. It's not going to be the same. We're not going back. That closet is blown wide open. In fact, the building's blown wide open, and it is our responsibility to make sure that we build it better this time. 

L: What do you see as the main issues in the industry? What should we look to if we want to rebuild a better cheese industry? 

R: One of the contemplations I had was, "Wow, how many cheese makers who are not white, middle-class people have I ever met?" Like a handful. A handful! Out of hundreds! Why is that? It makes me pull back and wonder "Who are the people that go into this business? Who are the people who succeed? Why is it so insular?" And I have some ideas. In general with farming, you either have to be rich to start, or more likely, you inherit land or capital. Who has land and capital? White folks. There are institutional problems that have prevented Black people, Asian people, Latinx people from farming. There's a real problem with how land has been consolidated, and kept out of the hands of POC. And those parcels have gotten so much bigger and yet there are fewer owners—it’s not being divvied up. There aren't opportunities. It's a moving target, to a certain extent, but changes at a government level are paramount. We have to change the way that farming is run in this country. And it can't be only corn and soy, on the good land—we have to diversify. We have to enable people to grow food in their communities.

But I mean, those were questions that I didn't even ask prior to March of this year. I was asking questions about "How do you dairy farm?" but I wasn’t asking questions about why all the dairy farmers white. Even if all the people working on the farms aren't. Going forward, I want to figure out how to be a part of a more inclusive cheese community. Not tokenist, but really, truly sharing information and figuring out how do we share? How do we make the best use of our resources? 

It’s the same way that I feel about cheesemaking: How do we make the best use of the resources we have, but instead of it just being the milk and the salt and the cultures, maybe it needs to be about the culture of cheesemaking and the culture of food systems—there's room for more players, but part of that means that every person doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. 

L: What do you think the cheese industry must do in order to rebuild as one that is inclusive and more diverse?

R: The starting piece is to try to create a community that is open, that is welcoming, that that allows for diversity. Part of it is just being aware. That you’re always asking, putting it out there and saying that we want to hire people who don't look just like us. I think that broader apprenticeship programs that are about offering training, income, education, and experience, are really important, as opposed to apprenticeships that are just washing dishes.

One of the biggest parts is just getting the word out through publicizing. The cheese world is sort of an echo chamber, so how do we get the word out beyond just the same people? 

P: We should have concrete diversity at conferences so we can start to see that we're in a global community. Not just a majority of white, because it's not that way with cheese. There's a lot of the world that isn't white that has cheesemaking heritage, so we just need to uncover and embrace it. I think the American Cheese Society can do a lot because it's really the only organization in the US that the artisan cheese makers pay attention to. It’s an American cheese society, not just North America, but also Mexico, Central America, and South America. Learning more about that, and bringing it into the annual conference of the ACS, and then, bringing that education to the public. There's also the Oldways Cheese Coalition. The director, Carlos Yescas, is from Mexico, and he's really forceful right now, taking the opportunity to highlight traditional cheesemaking from places other than Europe and the US.

R: You actually hit on something interesting because the US is so Eurocentric. When you think about interest in cheese in the last 50 years, it's not world cheeses, it is European cheeses and it's specifically French. That also could be part of the underlying insularity and whiteness. 

L: Do you know of any cheesemakers internationally who are doing traditional styles, or even just non-Western styles of cheesemaking that we might look toward?

P: We have a friend, Trevor, who worked in Mongolia and studied their cheesemaking styles. There, they follow their herds and they make and eat cheese regularly. You've also got Tibet, Nepal, and I think Hunan. With these Himalayan regions, the make styles are similar: stretched and dried cheeses. People who are very much on the margin with the amount of food they get every year are pretty careful about how much they put into the drying process. They don't want it to spoil so that they can eat it. So, in warmer climates, you've got dried, fresh or brined cheeses, and then you start to get a much more diverse variety when you get the cold. You can find cheesemaking almost anywhere in the world, but what you're going to see is that the traditional cheeses of those places came about because of the climate more than anything.

R: Places that depend on subsistence agriculture, places in which people eat the food they grow and make rather than shopping at a grocery, those cheesemakers don’t make 50,000 pounds of cheese to sell 500 miles away, they make food for their community. It is traditional, it is small scale, and it is much closer to subsistence. Our whole fucked up food system is one in which the businesses that are "successful," are the ones that ramp up huge production, wherein they're making worse and worse decisions in terms of their ingredients and in terms of the way that they treat their employees. 

P: That's the difference between it functioning in the US and it functioning in more subsistence, much poorer places. In much poorer places you still have around the town, villages with farmers, so you know you can get the milk . Here, that's all broken; there's nothing like that. It takes generations to build a regional or local food culture, which existed here before the 1940s when industrialization took over, and then we lost it all. Now, it's coming back, but it's only in its first generation, and it's a long term development. I think it's going to happen, because I think there are people like us who are not going to give up on it and go, "Oh well, it's just not really worth it." If I had chosen to scale up and industrialize 20 years ago, we'd have our sailboat and we'd be living on the coast in a nice beach house, but that's not what our lives are about, so there’s no other way. It really is about the choices you make. 

L: It’s a choice that doesn’t make magic

R: No, it doesn't make magic.

L: Do you think that the power to evoke that type of change comes from the bigger guys who hold power or the communities and followers of the smaller guys to force a need to change?

R: I think that change will only happen when all of it starts shifting. If there's anything that remains intransigent, be that consumers, eaters, be that industry, large businesses all the way too small, it will prevent change, but also regulation is vital. There needs to be a regulatory shift too, otherwise the wheel doesn't turn.

P: Large-scale manufacturers would do everything they could to prevent that much change because it isn’t in their interest. And you mentioned regulations—it is political, so you've gotta have the people who are analyzing and critically thinking also influencing policy so that the next round isn't so hard for the people that come after you. Through education and getting the word out, you're attracting people to what you're doing and they're buying your products, driving up demand, which supports the whole system. It all has to gel—that's what we see with how they preserve these systems in Europe. They didn't have to worry about the consumers, though, because the market was already there. Here, we've got the even bigger problem: educating consumers as to why traditional, locally-made, handmade cheese is different and important, not just for its flavor and history, but for the way it affects the whole food system, the whole world of agriculture. 

L: What do you think is the best way to go about educating consumers about the value of natural cheese?

P: We agree with Bronwyn and Francis Percival that it's up to the mongers. The mongers are the ones who have to make this happen—they're on the front line. It’s important for the mongers to carve out an area in their shop for the most special stuff, the natural-method cheese. It's part of the slow grinding, building up the knowledge of your clientele so that they understand the differences between cheeses in accordance with how they're made and choices that the cheesemakers made.

R: Mongers are incredibly powerful, because they're the ones who decide what you taste when you come in. I don't need to put a big guy out of business, there's no way that I can. What my appeal is, is that every shop that has a cut-to-order cheese case, that they keep a corner of that case for people who are making those decisions to make cheese as naturally as possible. There are very few who tick all the boxes in this country, but there are a nice sampling of people who are ticking off more than a couple boxes. With customers, the conversation should always start with scale because scale is self limiting. There are choices that once you make them, goodbye, you're done—you can't make natural cheese. The questions mongers and consumers need to be asking are first, “Is the cheese raw?” because if it isn't, we can already put that off to the side. “How much cheese is produced? Are the animals confined, or are they grazing?” Then ultimately, “what are the starters?” 

So, there is a quick and easy way to at least get a sense that there are five questions you could ask about every cheese in the case. There will be some people who aren't going to give a flying shit. They know exactly what they want and they don't want to talk to you about it. And that’s fine! 80% of your case is going to be other things because nobody can keep a store afloat that focuses solely on natural cheese. The important part then, is to get cheesemongers to recognize which of the people approaching that case are ripe for something exciting. Something where it's synergistic. Where it’s magical.

Parish Hill Creamery is located in Westminster West, Vermont. You can buy their cheese from their website www.parishhillcreamery.com/ or at their farm store located at 873 Patch Rd Westminster West, VT, US 05346. Ask your local cheese shop if they carry Parish Hill cheeses, and if not, be sure to request they bring it in. It will change your life.