Rodrigo directed me toward an antique prohibition against the sale of raw-milk products — not unlike a 1987-era FDA mandate that requires pasteurization for all milk-based products intended for human consumption, excepting aged cheeses. He explained how this type of regulation forces local, artisanal producers to industrialize operations or lose market share to big-name (lower-quality) competition. I, with a face full of raw-milk doce de leite, agree readily that artisanal production like his must be regulated, but by other means.

Another road-block for artisanal producers like Rodrigo is Brazil’s relatively high inequality and low median income. For generations, many urban consumers have elected for affordable alternatives over artisanal products, eroding their financial support. Brazilians eat loads of cheese — especially in their famous, and dubious, version of pizza or their answer to shepherd’s pie (escondidinho) — but most use low-quality products that bear the same, or ambiguously similar, names as traditional artisan work like Queijo Canastra or Requeijão. Rodrigo says that he’s unwilling to “kill” his product to make it financially competitive against cheap copycats.

Recently, some laws prohibiting or constraining the sale of raw milk cheeses have lifted, incidentally doing away with some illegal (and hilarious) cheese-smuggling cartels that used to traffic between São Paulo and Minas Gerais at night on dirt roads to avoid the cheese police.

Amidst changes in the legal system, in real incomes, and in the culture around food, Rodrigo is hopeful that his and other artisans’ products will make it back to cultural center-stage, as they have in France or Italy. But we’ll have to wait to find Rodrigo’s raw doce de leite and his cave aged cheeses in modern, large-scale supermarkets. In the meantime, if you come to Brazil you’ll have to make friends that know where to find the good stuff: na roça.

Vieira’s antique methods meet modern production techniques and environmental ethics. For a fazendeiro, or large land-owner, he shows remarkable consciousness of the impact his activities have on local ecology — and more surprisingly, why it matters.

The centuries subsequent to Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonization of Rio de Janeiro saw the systematic destruction of one of the world’s great rainforests (and the indigenous communities that cared for it): the Mata Atlântica. Today, less than 7 percent of the original biome stands, much of it restricted to fragments of less than 1/5th of a square mile (1/2 of a square kilometer).

Vieira told me, with some prodding, that his family land measures 47 alqueires, an antique Arabic-derived Portuguese measurement system that refers to, well, lots of land. On his account, he’s decided that rather than extract more minerals from the land in the form of coffee or other agricultural commodities, he’s letting much of it rest and recover into unbroken forest. Where the goats and cows graze, he’s employing a technique called silvopasture.

With collective consciousness shifting toward solutions for the climate crisis, producers like Vieira or Joel Salaatin at Polyface in the Shenandoah Valley might find a way for local producers to produce enough food to feed the world while remaining climate-friendly and, more importantly, in harmony with ancestral ecological systems that host the myriad environmental phenomena we’re just starting to understand.

This account details Valença’s raw-milk, award-winning but simple cheeses. Next, I hope to write about the deep traditions of the Serra da Canastra and the Italo-Brazilian cured blues and whites of the interior of São Paulo. Thanks for reading.