Romance vs Reality—two photos of the same alpine dairy farm; Corbeyrier, Switzerland.

The cheese made here is this landscape and weather—all of its vagaries, its sun and its dews, its microbial communities. The apricot dawns and slate twilights, summers, snowdrowned winters. The million mountain lives decayed into the pasture soil. The sum of this place’s history—filtered through cow and craft.

But a milking barn doesn’t smell like any of that. It smells like cow piss and cow manure and straw, humid with the warmth of beasts. Of course, none of that makes it onto cheese wrappers in the grocery store, or promotional videos by the dairy co-operative. But it is just as much a part of the process and the product as a lush meadow of cranesbill and cocksfoot grass. Just as much a part of the farmers’ lives.

This isn’t meant to rain on anyone’s parade, just to show what’s really behind that smooth slab of Gruyère. Cheese, like most true foods, is life’s totality. The sexiness and the shit.