The Cheese Trap

CHAPTER 1

The Ultimate Processed Food

Fugu is the world's second-strangest food. Fugu is the Japanese word for the meat of the puffer fish, that small creature who, when threatened, turns himself into a spike-covered balloon. Puffer fish have more than spikes; they also harbor deadly tetrodotoxin. One bite contains enough poison to paralyze your diaphragm and arrest your breathing.

The possibility of death by suffocation has not stopped adventurous diners from wanting to taste it. And Japanese chefs have been willing to dedicate three or more years of their lives to learning the fine art of separating the poisonous and nonpoisonous puffer fish parts in order to be legally allowed to serve it.

You really have to wonder, how did this start? What courageous adventurers were willing to experiment, Russian roulette–style, with various puffer fish organs until they got it right?

Well, the puffer fish has nothing on Camembert. Cheese is easily the world's strangest food, and the most improbable. Mother Nature never imagined anything like this.

First of all, one of our human forebears had to want to take milk from another species. It apparently took two and a half million years of human existence before that idea popped into someone's head. Then he or she had to figure out how to make an animal stand still long enough to extract her milk. That, too, was a challenge, when you consider the size of the animals involved and the fact that very few would be lactating at the appropriate time. And since animals produce milk only for a limited period of time after giving birth, our prehistoric food pioneer would have had to sort out how to keep milk flowing.

Then he or she had to mix the milk with bacteria to ferment it, and then combine it with enzymes hidden in the lining of the fourth stomach of a calf.

Finally, people had to like the gooey result—which was not a foregone conclusion, given that the smell of cheese is the smell of bacterial decomposition. In fact, the brevibacteria used to produce Muenster, Limburger, and several other common cheeses are the very germs responsible for the stench of unwashed human feet.

What are the odds? Makes fugu sound easy.

Indeed, cheese was not exactly an overnight sensation. There was not a single cheese factory in the U.S. until 1851, and it was not until 1935 that the average American ate even 5 pounds of it per year. But eventually it found its way into our hearts.

Into our coronary arteries, to be more precise. And into our thighs and hips, and spilling onto our medical charts. The health problems cheese causes are more subtle and protracted than puffer fish poisoning, but they are extremely common. So much so that most people assume they are just part of life.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at this odd, familiar, smelly, and loved product; how cheese makers turn a pail of milk into a block of cheese; and how a product of bacterial decomposition becomes hard to resist. In later chapters, we will see what happens when you swallow it.

Making Cheese

Cheese making is not without some theoretical advantages. Anyone who drinks milk knows that it does not stay fresh very long; turning it into cheese preserves it. Along the way, cheese concentrates milk's fat, protein, and calories. It also makes it a lot more portable.

Cheese also eliminates lactose, the milk sugar that is indigestible for many people. Nursing babies can digest lactose and use it for energy. But after the age of weaning, the enzymes that digest lactose start to disappear and, without them, milk causes cramps and diarrhea. Although many people—especially whites—carry a genetic mutation that makes those enzymes persist longer, the majority of adults are lactose-intolerant. But when milk is turned into cheese, that indigestible lactose is mostly removed.

To see how cheese is made, let's take a trip to the tiny town of Theresa, Wisconsin, northwest of Milwaukee. A little factory on Henni Street has been cranking out cheese since 1900. In 1905, John Widmer arrived in the U.S. from Switzerland, learned the cheese-making craft, and eventually took over the factory. It has stayed in the Widmer family ever since.

As you arrive in Theresa, you realize that you saw surprisingly few cows along the country roads. Obviously, the number-one cheese-producing state would need lots and lots of cows, but the fields were empty, for the most part. Where they are is something we'll touch on in Chapter 7.

Nonetheless, a huge milk shipment arrives at the Widmer's Cheese Cellars factory early each morning and is poured into two large vats, each about twenty feet long and three feet deep. It takes more than a gallon of milk to make a pound of Cheddar.

Because milk comes from a living, breathing animal, its chemical makeup varies from batch to batch, and that affects the taste or texture of the cheese. So cheese producers can head off problems by standardizing the milk—adding cream, skim milk, or skim milk powder, as the case may be, to keep the fat and protein content uniform from batch to batch.

They can also adjust the color. Cheese's orange color comes, in part, from traces of beta-carotene in milk—the same beta-carotene that gives an orange color to carrots and sweet potatoes. It is too dilute to be seen in milk, but it becomes visible as milk fat is concentrated in the cheese-making process. Widmer's and other cheese makers can legally intensify the color with annatto, a tree extract from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Goats, sheep, and water buffalos do not secrete beta-carotene into their milk as cows do, so their cheese is white. To make cow's milk mozzarella look white, some manufacturers add titanium dioxide or peroxides. Dunkin' Donuts used the same trick to make its powdered sugar extra white—until consumer complaints led to its removal.

Bring on the Bugs

With the vats now filled like milky wading pools, the next step is to add bacterial cultures. The bacteria ferment the milk sugar, lactose, to produce lactic acid, which contributes to the flavor of cheese.

What kind of bacteria? For a mild product, cheese makers use strains that produce lactic acid and not much else. For other varieties, they add cultures that produce various flavors and perhaps bubbles (to make holes). And they might eventually add molds and yeast, adding scents and tastes of their own.

Some bacteria are particularly stinky. Take brevibacteria, for example. This bacterial genus is ubiquitous. They are all over your skin and down your socks. If you haven't washed your feet in a while, it's those overgrowing brevibacteria that make people open the windows.

Brevibacteria are used to produce Muenster, Limburger, and several other cheeses, as we saw earlier. If these cheeses smell like unwashed feet, it's because you're smelling precisely the same thing.

Some cheese cultures include Staphylococcus epidermidis, one of the bacterial species responsible for human B.O. If you're hungry for details, the bacteria produce isovaleric acid (3-methylbutanoic acid), which imparts a characteristic odor to the human armpit and to some strong cheeses.

One of the compounds often produced during cheese making—butyric acid—is also produced when your stomach acid digests food, which is why, to many people, Parmesan has a faint odor of vomit.

As the cheese-making process proceeds, milk fats and proteins break down into a wide variety of chemical products, one of which is skatole. If you notice a slight off-odor (let's face it, cheese does not smell like roses), that is because skatole is also responsible for part of the odor of human feces (it is produced from tryptophan in the human intestine). The U.S. military has also used skatole for its nonlethal "stinkbomb" "malodorant weaponry" designed to temporarily incapacitate the enemy. But you can get it without a military contract. It is in ordinary cheese.

The human nose is exquisitely sensitive to bacterial decomposition, alerting us to food that has gone bad as well as to fecal contamination and other unclean things. But it is precisely the scents of decomposing food, unwashed feet, B.O., and human waste that end up in cheese.

Calves' Stomachs or Genetic Engineering?

Okay, our milk is standardized, pasteurized, and color-adjusted, and bacteria have been busily fermenting it. Now, it's time to coagulate it, turning fluid milk into solid curd. To do this, cheese makers add rennet—enzymes that break apart milk proteins and fats. Traditionally, rennet was taken from calves' stomachs, and Widmer's still uses this source. The liquefied calf extract looks a bit like tea as it is poured into the mix.

Most cheese makers use genetically engineered rennet. In 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the process in which enzyme-producing genes are inserted into bacteria and fungi, which, in turn, produce rennet. And some cheeses are coagulated without rennet, using plant extracts or—in the case of cream cheese, paneer, and other soft cheeses—citric acid, vinegar, and similar acids.

Rennet causes the curds to form, and the watery whey is then drained off. And that presents a new challenge, especially for large-scale cheese makers. What do you do with all that useless whey? Cheese factories put out tons of it, and it will take quite a landfill to handle that load of cheese factory waste.

As it happens, the dairy industry found a market for whey. Packed in a tub, whey protein is heavily promoted to body builders who can be induced to pay top dollar in hopes that it will pump up their muscles.

Forming and Salting

Time to pour the curds into a form—a round one to produce a wheel, a rectangular one to produce a block. These forms have also produced names for cheese: In Italian it is formaggio, in French fromage.

To make brick cheese—a Wisconsin original invented in 1877—Widmer's cheese makers pile on actual bricks, squeezing out the last bits of water and whey protein. And, yes, they use the same bricks that Granddad used.

Along the way, salt is added to stop bacterial growth and add flavor. As we will see in the next chapter, a surprising amount of salt ends up in every slice of cheese you'll find at the store.

Widmer's cheese blocks then go into the curing room, where warm, humid conditions encourage bacterial growth. Over the next week, the surface will be washed daily with bacteria, then the bricks are wrapped in parchment and foil for sale.

Endless Varieties

There are, of course, countless varieties of cheese that differ from each other based on the animal species they come from, the bacterial cultures used, the aging process, and other factors.

Cottage cheese and cream cheese are coagulated with acid, using little or no rennet. They retain a bit of lactose sugar and are not aged, which is why their flavors are mild.

Ricotta (Italian for "recooked") is made from whey, rather than casein.

Feta is traditionally made from sheep's milk or a combination of sheep's and goat's milk.

Although mozzarella traditionally comes from the milk of water buffalos, as we saw above, in the United States it is made from cow's milk. Thanks to its use on pizza, it has overtaken Cheddar as the number-one cheese in America.

Camembert and Brie, from northern France, are made with bacteria, mold, and yeast that contribute their own smells and flavors—objectionable to some, addictive to others. Only one small Camembert factory remains in the village of Camembert. Fromagerie Durand is happy to show you its cows standing in thick manure and the process of turning their milk into cheese.

Roquefort, Gorgonzola, and Stilton have mold introduced into their interiors. Roquefort is made with sheep's milk, Gorgonzola and Stilton with cow's milk.

Emmental (or Emmentaler), from Switzerland, is famous for its holes ("eyes"), which are the result of bacterial cultures producing carbon dioxide gas.

In medieval times, Edam's red outer color came from turnsole dye, according to Michael Tunick, a U.S. Department of Agriculture cheese scientist. Rags soaked with dye were hung over pans of urine. The urine's ammonia heightened the color of the dye, which was then rubbed onto the cheese. Today, the cheese's color comes from a red wax coating.