On a cold, wet August morning in the windswept high pastures of the Nepalese Himalayas, a stream of herders bring fresh milk to a makeshift tent at an altitude of 4,200 metres. The bells of grazing yaks and chauris (a cross between male yaks and female cattle) echo across the silent valleys as men work under a tarpaulin measuring, boiling and separating milk into curds and whey.
The curds are strained in cloth bags and pressed under weights to remove as much whey as possible before being sent to the village below to be made into churpi (or chhurpi), a dried snack that has found an unlikely new lease of life, transforming pastoralists’ lives in Nepal in the process.
