So who makes the cheese? We tend to think of cheese as a food produced by cheese makers-by people. Many months later the cheese is ready to be eaten. Because Laguiole is a raw-milk cheese, the milk contains naturally occurring bacterial communities, which ferment the sugars and proteins in the cheese as it ages. The curd is then pressed into a large block and left in a cold, dark room. To make the cheese, an enzyme is added to the milk, breaking molecular bonds and allowing the curd to be separated from the whey. In the case of Laguiole, the milk is processed by cheese makers who work at a co-op. From the grass, the animals then produce milk. The cows ingest these plants, which are inedible to humans-because we cannot digest the cellulose that they contain. The same cycle continues every year: the grass plants convert solar radiation, water, and micronutrients into more complex molecules through photosynthesis. The cows spend the summer months grazing on the wild grasses that thrive during the long sunny days. The purpose of the transhumance is to accompany the cattle from the barns, where they’ve spent the winter, to meadows higher up in the mountains. Laguiole, the cheese this area is famous for, is produced from the milk of cows that spend the summer eating wild grasses in the mountains. On the day that I joined a group of farmers and their cattle to climb the slopes of the Aubrac, the journey ended in a meal of potatoes and fresh cheese curd, mixed together to make a dish called aligot. This multispecies march of mother cows, calves, a bull, and people, is called the transhumance.

Every spring, farmers walk with their cattle from the village barns up the mountains to an area where there are wide-open meadows. How does a more-than-human lens change the way we understand the food we eat?Ĭheese has been made the same way for many centuries in a region of France called the Aubrac. Sarah Elton is an assistant professor and scholar of food systems, health, and ecosystems. More-than-human refers to contexts in which multiple species and processes come together to produce a result.

More Than Human by Doug Moench