It’s difficult to communicate how happy I am to discover this cheese. I have unknowingly been buying it in Jenny Lou’s and April Gourmet supermarkets, but on Tuesday, I met the man behind this fairtrade cheese farming, with good local cheese (of course it couldn’t compare with European types, but when in China, you adapt and make do with alot of things) made from milk of happy cows in the Shanxi province. Marc de Ritter of Yellow Valley found a way around the challenges of micro-finance in China—farmers are unlikely to return loans given the way the country was run during the communist era. It appears to be a sustainably sound model of deducting the costs of the milk with each production cycle, yet keeping with fair trade practices where the farmers are paid 20% more than the market price.
Of course I looked like a crazy person carrying a heavy wheel of cheese in my bag running around to events in heels and then I bumped into veritable foodie Eileen Wen Mooney to expose my loot and discovery of the day.
What can I say?
