'My Fellow Americans:' Whitney May, Cheese Maker

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MADELEINE BRAND, host:

This is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand.

From time to time we bring you stories of extraordinary people as part of our series My Fellow Americans. Today producer Jennifer Deer offers this audio portrait of Whitney Mayes. She's a cheese maker at a North Carolina goat farm.

Ms. WHITNEY MAYES (Cheese Maker): My name is Whitney Mayes. I am a cheese maker at Celebrity Dairy, and I live in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

(Soundbite of cheese-making operations)

Ms. MAYES: So this is this morning's milk.

(Soundbite of cheese-making operations)

Ms. MAYES: When I went to college in Nashville, Tennessee, I got a part-time job at a French bakery, and I grew up rural, rural Virginia, Appalachia. Goats were stinky, filthy animals; you didn't milk them, you didn't eat them. Only the crazy people up in the hills had 'em. So I had never been exposed to goat cheese before and instantly fell in love with it and all its versatility.

(Soundbite of cheese-making operations)

Ms. MAYES: Here's the ...(unintelligible) cheese. The plain logs, then we have the paprika, the party, the rosemary, the French Kiss, the confetti, the dill, the...

I found myself in a city--I found myself doing the restaurant business, and it wasn't until I came here and worked with the animals and worked outside and was so healthy that I saw something that I could spend my life doing that I jumped on it. I really just threw myself into it.

(Soundbite of cheese-making operations)

Ms. MAYES: So we are cleaning out the vat that was holding the curds and whey. So after dipping, you're left with a dirty, empty vat. And I like--like dirty dishes, I kind of like to get to it as soon as possible. I feel like the longer you leave something dirty, the harder it is to clean, 'cause eventually you've gotta clean it.

So it comes in this door from the milking parlor, it goes to the walk-in and then from there, pick it up, take it to the pasteurizer, dump it in; comes out of the pasteurizer, from the draining table to the mixing bowl. Twelve buckets and they all weigh about 45-ish pounds. You know, I don't have a membership to a gym; it saves me that money.

(Soundbite of goats bleating)

Ms. MAYES: It's our breeding season, so what you're smelling is a lot of musk, a lot of urine. Hey, fella. Hey, stinky. This is Rockabilly; he's our newest buck named for his punk hairstyle. We have two bucks for 75 does, so we have one buck who's running with this herd; it's about 45. And in a month, we'll put Rockabilly with the other herd, which is about 30 goats. So he's just waiting his turn.

These are the girls that were born this spring, so they're all about four months on average, and they're crazy. They do stuff like that; it's called capering--how they jump up, straight up and they twist around, kind of twist their heads and kick their legs out. That's very goat for them to do that. Hey, girls! What are you doing? It's hot?

I think another notion of the romance of this job is there's so few cheese makers. It's like how many cheese makers do you know? Not many. Me, neither.

(Soundbite of goat farm activity; music)

BRAND: DAY TO DAY returns in a moment. I'm Madeleine Brand.

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