The dairy industry in Idaho has seen explosive growth over the last decade or so. According to United Dairymen of Idaho, the state is now the 2nd largest milk producer in the West and the 3rd largest cheese maker in America. That output comes, in large part, from confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs,...
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If you noticed the post a while back, I spent several months this year trying to make cheese. Some attempts turned out surprisingly tasty (yogurt, mozzarella, manchego), others . . . not so much (a “quick” cheddar gave meaning to the phrase “chalk and cheese”). What my self-guided apprenticeship taught me was a deep,...
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Recently, Northwest Public Radio aired a profile about a family dairy as part of a series on the Northwest economy. It resulted in a flurry of comments from representatives of the dairy industry, and it spurred questions about the practices of pasteurization and homogenization. Mary Hawkins took the opportunity to speak...
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The New York Times Sunday magazine came out yesterday with it’s 9th annual “Year in Ideas” issue. The Times calls it a collection of “noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity . . .” Several of those notions involve food and beverage. Though they aren’t...
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(GH: Mary Hawkins of Northwest Public Radio interviews Trish Vieira, a small dairy owner in Spokane who got into the business out of frustration with the dairy industry itself. Viera says most milk is so processed “it comes to you white and liquid and that’s about the only resemblance it has to milk anymore.”)...
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A while back it struck me that I didn’t know what cheese was. I mean, I knew what it looked like and how it tasted — after all, I’ve had my share of grilled cheese sandwiches and molten mountains of gooey nachos — but I didn’t know cheese, how it was made, why a...
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Guy Hand visits a small dairy near Gooding with an award winning solution to the modern agricultural imperative to "get big or get out."
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