Processed Cheese, or, as it’s vulgarly called, American cheese. Hey, don’t blame the messenger. I’m not the one who is forcing humanity to eat two billion pounds of the orange stuff annually. I’m just telling you that we do. Anyway, cheese is hardly the thing to get snooty about. Any product that is made intentionally to both smell like feet and be put in your mouth, well, honestly. How much respect should it get?
Cheese is in fact the first and best example that a great many of humanity’s current culinary selections are based on bad judgment and/or someone drunkenly daring someone else to eat something entirely inappropriate. In the case of cheese, the going story (found on two entirely different cheese advisory sites, so you know it must be true) was that some 4,000 years ago, an Arab was crossing the desert with some milk in a pouch. What sort of idiot goes on a long journey across a desert with milk in a pouch? Well, see. This is the “bad judgment” part.
As the immortal song tells us, “in the desert, the heat was hot,” so by the time the Arab fellow decided to have a pull off his udder squeezings, the stuff had fermented and became two separate and entirely smelly objects. The first was the runny, armpit-smelling liquid called “whey” (think of the ooze that floats on top of your sour cream before you stir it up—sour cream, incidentally, yet another dare food from the land of dairy), and the other, a lump of disgusting goo which was the first cheese on record.
Any sane person would have flung the pouch of curdled mommy juice as far from their person as it is possible to fling it. But we’ve already established the fact we’re dealing with a fellow who’s a few camels short of a full caravan. So this genius eats the goo and drinks the armpit liquid. The cheese flacks who convey the story would have us believe he was “delighted” with his discovery, which makes me want to sit these flacks down and see how “delighted” they’d be to ingest fermented mammal squirts that had been lying in the sun all day, breeding microorganisms in a largely anaerobic medium. The fellow was probably delighted that he didn’t die the next day of food poisoning, and that’s about the extent of anyone’s delightment.
So why did he do it? I suspect the truth went something like this.
Cheese-Eater: Damn it, my goat’s milk’s gone stinky and bad. Look at it (shows it to friend).
Friend: Wow, that’s truly vile. I’ll give you a shekel to try some.
Cheese-Eater: You’re out of your freakin’ mind. I’d rather tongue my camel.
Friend: All right, two shekels.
Cheese-Eater: There’s no amount of money you can pay me to eat this stuff.
Friend: Five shekels.
Cheese-Eater: Okay.
(Tries some; doesn’t die.)
Friend: How is it?
Cheese-Eater: Not too bad. Want some?
Friend: You’re out of your freakin’ mind.
When you think about it, cheese and the process you use to make it is still unspeakably vile. Take milk and let it go bad, either by exposing it to various forms of bacteria or by ladling on an enzyme called rennin, which is obtained from the fourth stomach of cows (this last one is why vegans will have nothing to do with cheese). After it’s gone sufficiently bad, you dry it out and shove it in a corner for several months to let it go bad some more, only slower. You know it’s done when allowing it get any more bad would actually, you know, cause you to die when you ate it. I imagine they lost quite a few cheese-making monks to this testing phase.
There are hundreds of types of cheese, from Abbaye de la Joie Notre Dame to Zamorano; the varied nature of cheese initially had less to do with anything humans were doing than to the fact that every place on the planet has its own sorts of bacteria, so milk goes bad in different ways in different places. Eventually people gained some sort of control over the cheese-making process and started intentionally making different kinds of cheese, although the high-volume commercial aspect of cheese making had to wait until 1851, when the first cheese factory was constructed in upstate New York. Wisconsin, cheese capital of the world, saw its first cheese factory open seventeen years later. It was a Limburger cheese factory. There’s no punchline there, it’s the truth.
Processed cheese, the cheese of the millennium, reared its bland orange head in 1911 in Switzerland. However, the cheese gods had already favored that land with its own sort of cheese, the one with all the holes in it, so it was left to the Americans to take the process and popularize it. And they did: James Kraft developed his cheese processing process in 1912, perfected it five years later, and unleashed the cheese food product on the world shortly thereafter.
The process of processed cheese is the secret to its blandness—the natural cheese ripening process is interrupted by heat (read: they fry the bacteria before it gets out of hand and gives the stuff actual taste), and what you get is a block of proto-cheese that has an indefinite shelf life. It’s bland, but it lives forever: The Dick Clark of cheese.
Within the realm of processed cheese, there are gradations, relative to the amount of actual cheese in the cheese; the higher the number of qualifiers, the less cheese it has. To begin there’s processed cheese, which is 100% cheese, just not a very dignified kind (usually some humiliated form of interrupted cheddar, labeled “American” so the other cheddars won’t beat it up and steal its lunch money). Then there’s processed cheese food, which features cheese by-products as filler. This is followed by cheese food product, which includes some entirely nondairy ingredients such as vegetable oils. Finally, of course, there’s cheez, which may or may not feature plastics. The less said about that stuff, the better.
I certainly wouldn’t argue that processed cheese is the best cheese of the millennium in terms of taste, texture, quality or snob appeal (I may be glib, but I ain’t stupid), but I will suggest the utter ubiquity of processed cheese, American cheese, allows it to walk away with the title. Indeed, American cheese is to cheese as American culture is to culture: It’s not necessarily better, it’s just designed to travel, to be convenient to use, to be standard and unvaried and largely non-biodegradeable no matter where you find it.
We can even go so far as to say that American culture and American cheese will go hand in hand, right to the last. Thousands of years from now, after the inevitable apocalypse of some sort wipes out our civilization, future archaeologists will scour the land to make some sense of our times, and I think the process will go something like this.
Archeologist 1: Look, it’s another temple of the ancestors’ dominant faith. Note the golden arches.
Archeologist 2: And look what I’ve found in the storage crypt!
(pulls out a box of cheese slices)
Archeologist 1: Ah, the communion squares. For their ritual obescience to Ro-Nald, the demon destroyer of worlds. You can see his terrible visage bedecking the illuminated windows from behind the tithing altar.
Archeologist 2 (sniffing the cheese): These smell terrible. It must have been some sort of penance to ingest these.
Archeologist 1 (glancing over): You know, these samples have maintained their unholy orange taint. They may still be potent.
Archeologist 2: What are you saying?
Archeologist 1: I’ll give you 10 glars if you eat one.
Archeologist 2: You’re out of your freakin’ mind.
Archeologist 1: All right, 20.
Archeologist 2: Okay.