Welcome to Cheese, Culture and Beyond.

This is my labor of love, a no-frills/no-AI collection of information and commentary on the history of cheese

When I retired in 2023 after 37 years of faculty service at the University of Vermont, I had every intention of writing a revised and much expanded 2nd edition of the book Cheese and Culture, first published in 2012. The accumulation of new knowledge relevant to cheese history in a wide range of scholarly disciplines has been stunning since the release of the 1st Edition, and I confidently brought home to my attic office stacks of annotated hard copies of journal articles and pdf-files, waiting to be weaved into a transdisciplinary updated 2nd edition of Cheese and Culture that would withstand peer review and the scholarly test of time, a project worthy of the 1st Edition.

I began working on this 2nd edition project almost a decade ago, and although much progress has been made, the reality is that the weight of time now factors into every endeavor that I take on at this season of life, often in unanticipated ways. It turns out that I no longer have an encyclopedic mind and boundless energy that can juggle and collate 10 or 15 different areas of primary scholarship simultaneously, then meticulously interpret and craft new findings into an engaging narrative with carefully curated scholarly citations to ultimately produce a work of rigorous scholarship that is both accessible to a wide audience and a lasting addition to the scholarly literature.

Nevertheless, I have concluded that there is too much of value to allow a decade worth of work to come to nothing. Thus, my fallback plan is this blog site, Cheese, Culture and Beyond, where I will endeavor to post “in bits and pieces” key themes that would have been woven into the 2nd edition of Cheese and Culture. Almost everything that I post here moving forward will not include carefully curated scholarly citations and will not have been peer reviewed, so please don’t consider the pages of this site to be authoritative works of scholarship. I do believe, however, that you will find postings here to be great starting points for further inquiry and scholarship, should you be professionally interested in these areas.

Finally, a word of warning about “and Beyond”. Cheese history for me is a gateway and lens through which to ponder much deeper aspects of the human condition, beyond simple questions of what happened, where, and when, and why. Consequently, I find myself prone to straying into areas that lie at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and sociology. So beware.  From time-to-time there may be “and Beyond” posts that are tangentially linked to cheese history but branch off in directions that you may find uninteresting or perhaps even annoying or worse...Guilty as charged.

Paul Kindstedt

My journey with cheese

Over the years I have been asked many times to comment on my story: how did I become interested in cheese to the point of dedicating my professional life as a university professor to cheese science, and why do we even need to have cheese scientists at publicly funded Land Grant Universities like the University of Vermont?   Then there is the question of why did I expand mid-career into the entirely alien (for a cheese scientist) multidisciplinary scholarly pursuit of cheese history, and why did the University allow me to do so?  If you are interested in the human aspect of the university scholar and what drives one to press on into uncharted territory, I offer the following account of my own journey.   Feel free to keep on reading below, but If you are already yawning, better skip to the next page (Prerequisites for the Discovery of Cheesemaking) and hope for the best.

How does one write about one’s life experiences with enough detachment and objectivity to craft something worth reading, and to circumvent the slippery slope of narcissistic self-absorption. The approach that I will take here germinated last summer when I had the privilege of participating in a symposium at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Dairy Science Association. My assignment was to offer closing remarks to the audience, aimed specifically at passing on whatever wisdom and advice one can offer at the end of one’s career to the next generation of dairy science professionals. After thinking long and hard about the assignment, I settled on the power of encouragement as the most important thought that I could leave with my colleagues, because my story has always been more about key figures who stepped into my life to encourage me when I needed it the most, than about me. The following is an excerpt from those closing symposium remarks.


Well, the hour grows late and I suspect some of you, like me, have a hankering right about now for a pint, or perhaps something stronger, so fear not, I will keep my remarks very brief. But I do want to express my deep thanks to our speakers today...Each of these speakers have given me the gift of their encouragement, at a time when I needed it the most. They may not even realize that they played this role in my life, but I am here to publicly acknowledge them and give them my thanks.

Encouragement is such a simple way to make the world a better place, because every one of us needs it at some point in time, and if you are like me, it is not a one-time need, it’s ongoing. I wish I had done a better job of encouraging my students, my co-workers and staff, my colleagues and friends along the way, especially during those stressful years of one’s early career. So let me leave you with this closing thought. Our wonderful dairy science community has an essential role to play in this troubled world of ours. The world needs all of you to be the best that you can be so that you can come up with solutions to some of the most pressing challenges that face humanity, challenges that are daunting. The world needs for you to be at your best.

Encouraging one another helps all of us to become, and then to remain, the best that we can be, over the course of an entire career, indeed, an entire lifetime. And so I ask you, I encourage you, to go out of your way to identify that student, that co-worker, that colleague in your sphere of influence, who might need a word of encouragement today, or tomorrow, or the next day.. You literally can change the world for the better through them, just by lending them a bit of support when they need it the most. I know that this works, because I have been blessed by so many of you who have encouraged me along the way. So thank y’all, from the bottom of my heart, and Godspeed! Now, let’s go have that pint.

From time to time, I will be adding installments of My Story whenever I need a break from the grind of intense writing about cheese history. I will try to keep the perspective up at 40,000 ft, reflecting on the formative experiences and, especially, those individuals who profoundly influenced my journey as a human being and cheese scientist. These posts will likely fall into the “and beyond” category, so buyer beware; I won’t be insulted if you opt out of reading them. I just hope that you find something that engages you within this blog site.