I was raised by hippies in a van in the ‘70s, crossing the country with whatever the road would give us. When the food ran out my mother stole, but never the staples. She wouldn't touch bread or milk or eggs, wouldn't drive the price up a nickel on people as poor as we were. So she took the things the rich had already inflated all by themselves. Tinned caviar. Good cheese. Pickled herring. Crackers that cost more than the meal they sat on.

Which is how a barefoot kid sleeping in a parking lot learned terroir before he could spell it. The region in the caviar. The season in the herring. The hillside in the cheese. I learned taste and principle in the same act of theft, and I have never once been able to pull them apart.

The hair left in my twenties. I didn't fight it. A man came up to me in a bar and gave me a name, and I kept it, because a name you're handed in contempt and wear anyway tells the world you've already made peace with the worst thing it can say about you.

Then one day in Austin I heard a man explain, dead serious, how you milk a rat. And something that had been asleep in me since the van sat straight up.

The future of dairy is small. It is dense. It is meaner about efficiency than anything lumbering around on four legs, and it is more honest about where flavor comes from than a hundred years of beige cheese bred to offend nobody. This is the room where the people who believe that find each other.

Stay bold, my friends.

– BigCrazyBaldhead