Milkfed

Climate resilience is a measure of how well we're able to weather (no pun intended) the chaos that climate change creates, now and in the future. Unfortunately, the U.S. dairy industry has been going big on one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in our country: the Southwest, where megadairies and the alfalfa fields that feed them dominate, thanks to an outsized share of the Colorado River's w...

Climate change is here, it's happening, and farmers are on the front lines as extreme heat, drought, floods, wildfires, and storms become everyday events. To protect their animals and their businesses, dairy farmers and cheesemakers have to adapt. Alex shares the stories of a dairy farmer in Puerto Rico who's breeding heat-resistant cows, a goat farmer and cheesemaker in Vermont dealing with micro...

Agriculture isn’t the world's largest contributor to climate change, but it's close. It’s also one of the most fraught sectors in terms of public debate about what we should—or shouldn’t—be raising, harvesting, and eating. Alex breaks down the climate change by the numbers to see exactly where emissions from food production and raising livestock come from—and ruminates on how cheese devotees might...

Alex covers the last 500-odd years of cheese and climate: how settler colonialism and capitalism shaped today’s cheese industry and our contemporary climate crisis, how industrialization changed the scale of food production, the rise of alternative food movements like organics and the American artisan cheese renaissance, and recent economic and political developments in the US that are affecting e...

How did we get to a point in human history where food production could become one of the main drivers of an existential crisis for our planet? Scholars theorize that humanity’s “discovery” of fermented dairy products thousands of years ago played a key role in our survival as a species. Alexandra looks at the essential role cheese played in human history; how climate change has affected agricultur...

This is the story of how I arrived in a complicated position: A cheese lover and cheese professional who’s questioning how the industry I love contributes to and is impacted by the climate crisis. You'll learn who I am, how this podcast came to be, and the roots of my own climate anxiety—plus what you can expect over the next 5 episodes. LINKS: My website My book, Stuff Every Cheese Lover Should K...

I'm Alexandra Jones, food writer, recovering cheesemonger and creator of the new limited series Milkfed: A Podcast About Cheese, Culture, and Climate. Two years ago, I began researching the relationship between cheese and climate change. I wanted to better understand how the industry I've worked in for more than 15 years fits into the climate crisis, how the people who make move, buy and sell chee...