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taste family ties 12 The Cheese Guide the world. McKnight grew up an hour and a half away in North Carolina's Sandhills, came to Chapel Hill to go to college and just never left. These days, she feels like she's become a stranger in a strange land. "The people who live here are not the people who grew up here," she said. "I regret that we've lost that." She and her partner, Flo Hawley, are countering that sense of loss by making cheeses that are a stake in the ground, anchoring their Chapel Hill Creamery to their cows, their neighbors, their community and their shared history. "We would like to be part of a movement where people eat closer to home," she said. "I regret that there's not more regionality.... Having our cheese as part of regional cuisine helps us hold onto that." Most people who've never lived in North Carolina and shopped for their food at the local farmers markets have never tasted a Chapel Hill Creamery cheese and never will. That's all right with McKnight. "We provide a local product for a local community," she said. "I don't think either of us is particularly interested in selling our product in Austin or Chicago. We don't have any connection to those places." Hawley and McKnight had both worked at Whole Foods for almost 20 years when they decided that they were ready to stop being just a link in their local food supply chain and start being an anchor. "We wanted to create the product that we wanted to BY LORRIE BAUMANN My father was born in Durham, North Carolina. He enlisted in the Air Force and married a California girl while he was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and I grew up understanding that duty requires that you go where you're sent. Today, I have a son and his family who live in Reno, Nevada. My daughter married a man from Kentucky and took her family with her as her employment took her from Kentucky to Iowa and then to Kansas and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, before she landed most recently in Auburn, Alabama. My seven-year-old grandson has already lived in four states, and he's very likely to live in a few more over his lifetime. Portia McKnight declines to be part of this kind of economically-driven diaspora. She sees its results all around her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a part of the North Carolina Triangle region that encompasses the university cities of Durham, the home of Duke University; Raleigh, the home of North Carolina State University; and Chapel Hill, the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation's first public university. Those three universities, together with local governments and business interests, developed North Carolina's Research Triangle Park in 1959, and since then, the area has been a prominent hub for high-tech research and development that has created an economic boom for the region and the resulting growth of a diverse, highly educated population that comes to North Carolina from around a of in North Carolina