In this chronicle of his decades-long relationship with the world's greatest cheese, GQ correspondent Michael Paterniti moves to pastoral Spain to track down its maker—a man named Ambrosio, an ebullient talker, quick to parcel out life's most naked truths. An exclusive excerpt from The Telling Room.

Ambrosio listened to me intently, replacing the porrón on the wooden surface, and then spoke, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation we'd been having. Or delivering a familiar speech that came as a non sequitur. "The problem with the world," he said, "is that no one knows how to shit anymore."

Had we misheard? He'd used a form of the word cagar: to shit. There wasn't a flicker of a smile.

He stressed that he still tried to eat in an ancient way, and "the act" was nothing to be afraid of. When the feeling struck, especially in the fields, it was natural to unbuckle and squat, and to do so with friends, was, well, edifying, equalizing, true. He painted a picture of what it meant to cagar on a place he called Mon Virgo. His father sat nodding his head, but it was unclear whether this was, in fact, the delirium of fatigue, because soon he let himself droop on the table and fell to light snoring.

"You start by eating good beans and a good lettuce salad with olive oil and tender lamb chop or fresh rabbit," Ambrosio explained. "Everything is accompanied by a good piece of wheat bread and a good wine and good friends and, at the end, a sip of brandy. Oh how happy you are—and your body's happy! And it begins to digest. You ask, Now? And your body says, In a half hour. And so, eventually, your intestines tell you: This is the moment! You can't lie, it's an honest moment. If you go to a meeting or work on the computer or drive your car, you're going to miss one of the best moments of your life. You're surrounded by the wonderful aromas of the earth—the sage and chamomile— and you can see the village and your home and your entire life down here below Mon Virgo. In this moment you could say to your friends, 'Look where we are! Look at how incredible this is! Look how happy!' It's as if you're seeing God in this moment."