I am extremely pleased to announce the sale of James Beard Award-winning author Catherine Donnelly's next book, tentatively titled The Raw-Milk Cheese Manifesto, to Chelsea Green Publishing. Cathy, who teaches at the University of Vermont, will be joining an industry leading, food- and sustainability-focused publisher based in White River Junction, VT. I may have to visit the Chelsea Green office when the book publishes in 2019, right around my 10-year Middlebury College reun

I've been reading up on the FDA's attempts to ban raw milk cheeses, separating fact and fiction when it comes to raw milk cheese safety, for a book proposal I am working on with Dr. Catherine Donnelly (UVM). At the same time I was asked to write a blog post for a class I'm taking at Duke called "Science and the Media." Voila, my blog post on the recent Listeria outbreak at Vulto Creamery in upstate New York... enjoy! http://scipol.duke.edu/content/perspective-vulto-creamery-a

The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, has published my favorite review of The Oxford Companion to Cheese to date. It begins with the above picture of a man's armpit and cheese tattoo, and only gets weirder from there. I'm not entirely convinced its author, Ian Brown, actually likes cheese - this paragraph in particular raises doubts: In other words, there is a distinct lacto-cannibalistic element to eating cheese, which then returns to the ecosystem (though not always eas

Congrats to all 325 authors who contributed to The Oxford Companion to Cheese. It looks like ours was the only edited volume, and what a collaboration it was! Here's the full lineup of shortlisted titles. I don't envy Bee Wilson (food) and Fiona Beckett (drinks), whose job it was as judges to narrow down from 200+ worthy submissions. FOOD BOOKS The A-Z of Eating by Felicity Cloake (Fig Tree) Flavour: Eat What You Love by Ruby Tandoh (Chatto & Windus) Fresh India by Meera Sodh

On November 10th Oxford University Press launched The Oxford Companion to Cheese at Murray's Cheese in New York City. I wrote the proposal for this book in 2012, and then chipped away at it for four years, working with a truly excellent editorial board and a huge team of 325 authors. So the celebration was a long time coming, and well worth the wait. I caught up with Cathy Donnelly (the Editor in Chief), Mateo Kehler (who wrote the Foreword), and my former colleagues in marke