A Processed Past

Melted, raw, hard, herbed, semi-soft, or bleu, cheese appears regularly on most of our plates and lends some of Morningside Heights’ greasiest spoons their, well, grease. We know cheese comes from milk—think of all that calcium on a slice of Koronet, right?!—but how does milk, which by the time it appears in a nonfat vanilla latte resembles white water, transform into the endless variety of cubed samples in the aisles of Westside Market? (I can’t be the only student who stops in for no other reason than a free cheese snack.)

Aided by the New York Times food writer Mark Bittman’s tome How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, my roommate and I sought to find out. We endeavored to curdle our own batch of ricotta, challenging our culinary expertise. The ingredient list looked manageable: 1⁄2 gallon milk, two cups of buttermilk, and a large pinch of salt. The utensil list appeared only slightly more unusual, requiring cheesecloth in addition to a strainer and heavy-bottomed pan, easily satisfied by a trip to Zabar’s.

In the pot, and on the stove, we soon had the milk roiling and doused the bubbles with buttermilk, waiting for magic to happen. As an acid, the buttermilk separates the casein, or milk protein, from the remaining vitamin, mineral, and lactose-rich liquid known as whey. Cheesemakers frequently use rennet, the lining of calf’s stomach, for the acidification process, unbeknownst to many vegetarians. Commercially, leftover whey is used as a high-protein additive in sports drinks and processed foods, but at home whey can serve as a substitute for water in some recipes such as in baking bread and cooking beans.

As promised, white blobs of congealed milk protein known as curds arose, which we then strained from the surrounding pale yellow liquid. Looking at the small coagulation that remained from so much milk, I wondered how our rubbery curds resembled the multitude of colors, flavors, and textures that smatter cheese counters. From high-end fromageries like Murray’s Cheese in lower Manhattan to big box wholesalers like CostCo, our options appear endless. But from where does such gastronomical diversity come?

Reference to historical precedent proves valuable here. Cheese promised the same advantage to ancient civilizations worldwide: that of preserving the calories, nutrients, and taste of milk for longer during a time without substantial refrigeration. While the basic steps of producing cheese remain the same, the given conditions of early cheese-producing locales influenced how each type of cheese developed. Thus variations in process affected the qualities of the final product, such as durability, aging, flavor, and fat content. Hence why so many cheeses are the namesake of their towns of origin—brie (France), gorgonzola (Italy), muenster (Germany), and gouda (Holland).

Yet despite regional variation, cheese commands a Western bias with the exception of paneer, a soft cheese akin to cottage cheese, from India, and a variety of yak and cow’s milk cheeses sprinkled throughout Asian cultures. With the spread of the American diet across the globe, cheese now graces foreign palates in fast foods such as pizza, hamburgers, and macaroni and cheese.

Rising American food influence begs the question, what about our namesake cheeses? Currently, a small but growing back-to-the-farm movement is cultivating a new class of artisan cheese makers in addition to long-standing production hubs in Wisconsin, upstate New York, and California. Nonetheless, the most widespread U.S. cheese production lacks a regional identity and occurs in the form of so-called American cheese, the individually-packaged, perfectly square slice, so orange it nearly glows. From where does this cheese come, and more importantly, what is it?

American cheese equates with processed cheese, a varying combination of other cheeses mixed with emulsifiers, flavorings, stabilizers, salts and acids to produce a substance akin to cheddar but without a distinctive taste or quality. Depending on the quantity of additives mixed in, the cheese can, by law, lose its distinction as cheese and become a “processed cheese spread” or “cheese product.” As products recognizable more for their packaging than substance, Velveeta and Cheez Whiz look less and less like cheese at all, provoking questions about their health, safety, and ethicality. How do artificial additives affect our bodies? Does mass production encourage overconsumption?

Thanks to marketing, it is convenient for consumers to group foods of different origins such as American processed cheese and authentic Irish cheddar into the same class, whether they contain one hundred or twelve percent of the namesake product. Presented with so many gustatory options, consumers lack the time to investigate each item. Lax government oversight and political reluctance to denounce any product with dubious contents provides no help.

Thus the gulf between our stove top ricotta and a Kraft single-slice remains vast and shadowy to most eaters. Maybe we should be embarrassed by the culinary degradation of our cheese, or snidely proud that our powers of persuasion (intimidation?) convince other countries to eat an industrial food product of Parisian cheesemongers’ nightmares. But aside from concerns for our international image, since a region’s cheese is a reflection of its past, perhaps we should worry most about what a product like American cheese will say about us in the future. Homogenized, of mysterious origins, artificially colored, and individually packaged—one hundred years from now, will we take pride in such a past?

Becky Davies is a Columbia College junior majoring in urban studies.Home Ec runs alternate Mondays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com