Ridiculous HistoryLet's be honest: cheese is inherently weird. As humanity advanced, civilizations leveraged positively alchemical science to arrive at the perfect cheeseburger melt. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max explore the evolution of processed cheese -- the not-quite-cheese that changed the world.
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. If you can hear me cheesing on the mic, it's because I'm pleased as punch to be joined with our brain trust of host of producers, starting with super producer mister Max Williams.
Oh hello, I'm here, and you're starting with me.
Pleased as cheese.
Yes, yes, so hard. That's mister Noel Brown. The condition Yeah, yep, that's mister Noel Brown. This is gonna be uh, this is gonna be an interesting episode for our pal Max due to the condition. I am Ben Bolin. We are joined vicariously with our research associate Wren and recently, off air we had we had a brief conversation about about foods that we're interested in. We did talk a little bit about Haggis off air after our dairy and Gap episode. But I feel like it's fair to say conditioned aside in principle, we're all fans of cheese.
I think, so, Max, can you have vegan cheese?
Yes, yes, vegan cheese is a go too, And I can actually have soft cheese, so I can have like mazzarella.
It's a harder cheese. I can't have a little chevra.
You have a little chevra?
Yeah, okay, okay, I mostly.
Played and just a little ricotta cheese. Where you at with cottage cheese?
Oh, cottage cheese. I should be able to have cottage. Honestly, I'm bad as gross when it comes to the condition it is.
Yeah, I mean cheese as a concept to We were talking about this on an episode of on a show called Very Special Episodes about Big Parma. How cheese and dairy became a huge part of the American diet. And this is a natural, you know, palette complementer to that conversation. Uh, where we at with cheese?
Whiz?
Where we at with velveta? Where we at with craft singles? I'll tell you this, man. I know, processed cheese is not the best thing for a human body, but I love it. I am like I might be addicted to velveta at some points in my life.
It's a good mac and cheese option, that's for sure. I think I prefer it to the craft powdered mac and cheese. Yes, I think that's right. And you can also buy it in like these bricks, these soft bricks of Elvida, and then you can mix it with whatever noodles you choose, you know, so that's a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of the Craft singles. I gotta say cheese product because of the way that it doesn't split when you put it on a burger. It gets you that perfect even melts. And if anyone's seen the movie The Menu starring Ray Fines as a maniacal what do you like michelin E type chef, even he sings the praises of Kraft singles. And I think even when you go to like fancy or burger type places or smash burger joints that are really popular right now, you're gonna.
See that cheese product because of its melting properties.
Mm hmm, yeah, that's true. We'll get to the melty science behind this. There is a reason that people have, at least in the West, held processed cheese in its own rarefied air. It's a familiar ingredient in American cuisine. If you travel to other countries and you are, you know, eating a burger somewhere, the American burger is probably gonna have processed cheese on it because it became synonymous with the United States.
One hundred percent. The question then becomes ben as you have alluded to, what the heck is in this stuff? This cheese product, processed has a real negative connotation in general when we're talking about nutrition. Is this stuff as plastic as the thin plastic coating that it comes in?
That is the question for the court today, mister Brown, I believe we can begin with good dues. A lot of us will be relieved, hopefully to learn that the main ingredient in all processed cheese is still to this day, actual cheese.
That's right.
They just can't call it cheese because it's the percentage isn't enough for it to be considered pure cheese. It is, in fact cheese product you'll see often listed on those packages. According to Food the Alex Delaney in a twenty eighteen article for a Bon Appetite, this is what they have to say about it. Processed cheese isn't one hundred percent cheese. Most of the time. It hovers around fifty percent cheese, sometimes more and sometimes less. But at a base level, processed cheese is real cheese cut with other non cheese ingredients. Okay, we stepped on a little.
Bit, they stepped on the products. Yes, shout out to the wire and all the hip hop that I love. But there's good news still because these non cheese ingredients are a mission critical factor in the meltiness that we all adore. Right, the word process, as you mentioned, has a negative connotation, kind of like saying scheme in US English book callback callback. But really it's it's unfair to immediately condemn something just because the word processed is used to describe it. You know, butter is processed milk, grape juice is wine too, I guess is just processed from grapes. You have to have some sort of intervention to create the end thing.
Well sure, I mean you could even go so far as to say the process of fermentation could fall into this category.
You know.
So the buzziness and the negative connotation of the term processed, you know, causes quite a bit of hullabaloo. And I think maybe something ado about nothing.
M Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very fair point because, you know, depending on the kind of processed cheese food products that's one for the Americans. Depending on the type of fig you're looking at it could be made entirely of ingredients that the ordinary consumer would consider natural. If we're talking processed cheese, it usually does begin with a shredded our pal Lurin would say actual facts cheese, colby or cheddar. Right.
It's then melted and mixed with water, milk, and oil. This is added to the hot cheese, hot cheese.
I love that phrase hot chee good, just you should use it in regular conversation to refer to something that's awesome. At this stage, the ingredients start to separate from one another because dairy and oil have different properties, sort of the way olive oil sits on top of the rest of the liquid inside salad dressing and you have to shake it up, or like the way the blobbies and lava lamps can exist inside the same container but never actually combined. It's sort of a is it a suspension? Is that the terms it means.
That they they are segregated. Basically, they're not mixing into one homogeneous substance. And the reason that you have processed cheese at all, Folks, is due to emulsifying agents. And emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that would ordinarily be in that lava lamp situation, and you are able to include some intervening factor or substance that brings them together. In the case of processed cheese, we're thinking stuff like sodium citrate. That would be one of the most famous examples that I can conjure up. Also, bonus points, sodium is a preservative, so this makes processed cheese lasts longer than the fresh cheese you would get at the farmer's market.
Yeah. Absolutely mean.
Think of the way naval rations are preserved, and like salt barrels, you know, and salted meats and all of that stuff, very much the same situation. The final consistency of the cheese is ultimately determined by the amount of emulsifier that's used, the temperature, the moisture content, and the degree of blending that takes place throughout this process.
Okay, this is already sounding a little complicated for some of us in the crowd, But also remember, folks, if you introduced or described natural cheese to anyone who had never encountered it before, it would sound pretty crazy, right. You would say, you know, we got milk, right, we get milk from these other animals and then we do this weird process to it, right, as you said, Noel, all cheese is processed milk, right and then and then sometimes we just let certain bacteria go go hogwild on when.
You're really unpack it like that, Ben, it is kind of gross if it weren't so delicious and crack like that is the thing. There have been studies that say that cheese can be as addictive as crack cocaine.
Oh wow, well, good thing. I tried cheese first. I'll be addicted to that one. I think we both will. We also have to, as Ren points out, address something called easy cheese. Easy cheese is different from cheese whiz, which we're gonna spend some time on. Easy cheese does come in an aerosol can, but apparently it's not a true aerosol.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's because a thin layer of plastic at the bottom of the can prevents the propellant that is included from mixing with the cheese, so it does have that separate component. This separation allows the cheese to emerge from the can in a nice ropey strand rather than a fine mist like a traditional aerosol spray like.
A rope strand I said what I said, you said.
What you said, and I've got your back, I got your thank you. So easy cheese is interesting because there is natural cheese in it, but it is not the protagonist. It's not the main character of the ingredient list. Instead, you're going to see stuff like wave protein concentrate and of course canola oil. It also gets its fluorescent orange color from naturally derived sources. So we're already seeing that processed cheese has its own panopoly of very distinct entities. If we want to talk about the current state of cheese, I guess we have to do a little ridiculous history about cheese in general.
Yes, cheese, one oh one, So let us venture together to the Swiss Alps.
Yes.
Yeah. The earliest mention of what we would call processed cheese actually comes from Homer, comes from the Iliad, and this is written in around like eight hundred BCE, and it talks about how you could goat or sheep milk with wide and flour, kind of a precedent for fondue. And that's where we get to, as you were saying, Switzerland the thirteen hundreds, this is where we see the real versions of cheese exist everywhere, but this is where you see the real fancy cheese, guys.
And this was created in the Mental region of Switzerland and the thirteen hundreds. And you may have heard of mental cheese, which I believe is the well, there's raklets, of course, but menthal cheese is another kind that is used and melted down if I'm not mistaken for a fondue situation. So Swiss cheese is considered an early example of processed cheese because rennet is one of the main ingredients. Is itself a preservative traditionally found in the stomach lining of livestock. It is an enzyme that causes the protein and milk to coagulate. So I'm sorry I may have been off base and calling it a preservative. It is, however, a chemical additive and the same way that preservatives are.
Yeah. Yeah, And because of that rennet, because of those enzymes added to the original product, Swiss cheese is considered processed. Now, let's let's stick with fondue. I've got I've got some I almost said I have some rennet. I've got some mmental in the fridge right now. So we're interested in learning more about this. If you go a little bit forward in time to the eighteen hundreds, you'll see the next iteration of fondue. It arrives to us from the Swiss Alps, and at the time, just like we were talking about off air with Hagis, at the time, this was not considered a fancy special occasion thing like going to the melting pot or another fondue restaurant. Instead, this was what we would call a struggled meal like people ate it because they had to work with what they possessed.
One hundred percent. Winter in the Swiss Alps was rough, long, harsh, and freezing, so the peasants had to use this aged cheese and bread because fresh produce just wasn't on the table literally and figuraly. By combining their cheese with flour, wine, and some herbs like you mentioned earlier, ban over an open flame, these peasants were able to create a very tasty and long lasting food item that would take the edge off winter's chill. According to the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin website at Wisconsin Cheese dot.
Com, m yeah, the method that people use to make American cheese today largely was also created by a couple of Swedes, Swedish guys named Walter Gerber and Franz Stettler. In nineteen eleven, they said, all right, let's make something that we can ship off to warmer areas of the world. And our super move will be to ship this without its spoiling. And they added sodium citrate to this melted emmentol to this hot cheese. And they did you know, their experiment was successful. They made a product that could last longer on the shelf. But there was someone else in the game, someone who was living across the pond, as we say, who grew his own kind of hot cheese science experiment hot cheese, resulting in a business empire that is worth over thirty seven billion US dollars as we record today, It's time to metium noll oh big Cheese.
In nineteen sixteen, Canadian American immigrant James Lewis Kraft with a K you know it, obtained his first patent four processed cheese. Along with his little brother Norman, the Crafts would transform the landscape of the supermarkets. In its very first iteration, craft cheese was slightly different from the line of.
Products that we know today. How is it different?
You know? First off, it's sold in jars or cans because it doesn't have a mulsifying salts Noel. Before we continue, I have a pitch for the Ridiculous History Cinematic Universe. Oh my gosh, please, okay, dude, what if we make a film, a movie about James and Norman Kraft and how they created this process cheese Empire, and we just call it the Craft with a k light is a feather stiff as a board? Throw in some occult reference.
Why not? You know we could make them like Vampire Hunters too or something.
Yeah, that's the Craft, only.
If it's a spiritual sequel to the episode we're going to do about the Kellogg Brothers.
Oh have we not done the Kellogg Brothers episode yet? Oh?
We've well, movie correction, we'll make were gonna make the movie also?
Oh okay, Yes, and they're also vampire Hunters, great rival vampire Hunters.
Yes, and the way they kill vampires, but.
You can't write that. You can't say that, right.
I like the idea though, that they're both using dairy to fight vampires. I will say this is a very anti vampire stance we're taking. And there's reason because vampires can't eat cheese.
Is that true?
Yeah, they can't eat change.
Okay, they're lactose intolerant then.
Yes, yes, that's the that's the real problem with vampires. You heard it here first, folks. In nineteen twenty one, we know that the Craft Company did patent or patent applications for multifying salts.
In nineteen forty four, however, Craft secured another patent, this time for the process that led to the delightful little Craft singles that we know and some of us love today. This was a major improvement to the former loaf situation. These little slices account today for roughly seventy four percent of all processed cheese sales in the entirety of the United States.
Wild right, wild. This goes into some of our other explorations about how the US government in particular got so deep in bed with big Dairy, Big Parma Man.
Check out that episode, by the way, was it called very special Episodes?
Yeah?
Big How cheese got in everything?
Yep?
Featuring Ben Bolin and his buddy Alex French.
Thank you so much, man. It's it's a weird one, for sure. It is a true story, and Craft does occur within that story. We also learned something we mentioned on previous episodes of Stuff they Don't want you to know, Noel, which is that the US government, as we record, is currently storing one point four billion pounds of processed cheese in this underground cave syte them in Missouri.
A bunker situation. Yes, b bro, I've got a pitch for you.
What if when Elon Musk blows the doors off of Fort Knox, it's not full of gold bricks at all, but just bricks of velveta.
I love it, oh, because they would look like gold you've thought about. That's smart.
Liquid gold is what we call it.
Cheese.
This is this is weird. We have to dive into this. Why does Uncle Sam have over a billion pounds of cheese hidden weigh in caves? That is true. You know it sounds weird, but it is true. It's because in the nineteen seventies, the US had a milk shortage, but the demand for dairy did not decrease, and as a result, dairy products, everything that falls under the category of dairy, the prices for those spiked by thirty percent. It's kind of similar to what we're seeing with eggs in the US. Today.
Is this the government cheese everyone's always talking to this gets to it.
Yeah, okay, great, So as we're currently seeing with eggs. Like you said, when inflation impacts the cost of an important staple food, A, people get irritated because they can't afford one of these common items that are relied upon for sustenance, and B they buy less of that product because they just don't have any other choice. But then enter our hero in the situation. I guess our buddy, President Richard not a crook, Nixon, who did have a bit of a plan here, Old.
Tricky he says. He says, Look, we're going to pass the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of nineteen seventy three. This did have price controls, it did have subsidies. It said milk should only be, you know, at this reasonable price, and if you're a farmer and you're struggling, we're going to give you a little cash on the side to help you make it to the next year. We're also getting rid of all these crazy import quotas we had from the Great Depression. This band aidd the discrepancy between supply and demand. But you know, Nixon probably had some back room smoky deal.
I think that's kind of a thing.
I guess, wouldn't it.
It's something in the eyes.
I think you're right, very shifty tricky. But if you know anything about tricky, Dick Nixon probably isn't cheese related or dairy related. A bit more of that old that hotel. Yes, yeah, I gate some water. So President Jimmy Carter, classic Georgia boyp.
Only just recently thought he was going to live forever.
Yeah, we had all hoped. He took office in nineteen seventy seven, and it looked like the Nixon administration had over corrected with dairy products and supply and demand. Because now dairy products are so cheap that farmers are losing money by running their businesses. You can't move the milk fast enough. The economics no longer makes sense. So production is still continuing at the same rate because they already have all these cows, right, they already have all these dairy cows, and they're going to keep making milk. Congress and President Carter, they get incredibly concerned that if they allow these farmers to go into other businesses, they're just going to create another dairy shortage. So now we see another big government act, the Food and Agriculture Act of nineteen seventy seven.
Right, it supply more subsidies to dairy and with the government buying all of that access product, farmers were able to continue on as usual. But the government did now find itself with a bit of a cheese glut.
Hot cheese, hot cheese. They got that hot cheese. They had so much stuff. First off, I would point out they had so much milk, and milk is cartoonishly perishable, right, so they had to transform it into something that would last a little longer, which means their next move are going to be things like butter and cheese. And by the time Ronald Reagan comes after President Carter in the early nineteen eighties, the government has bought up five over five hundred million pounds of processed cheese just to keep the dairy industry going.
That's wild.
That does not seem like the best arrangement. What on earth did they do with all of this cheese? According to a USDA official in nineteen eighty one in an article in the Washington Post, probably the cheapest and most practical thing to do would be to dump it in the ocean. But Reagan was a frugal man. He did not believe he was a waste not, want not type fellow. He wanted that hot cheese the trip down.
He wanted that hot cheese to trickle down in ropy string.
Oh yeah, thank you man, thank you.
So it's nineteen eighty one, then President Reagan is coming to the public in December, and he says, at a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turned to waste. This is where his administration founds the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. This is the government cheese. They took all the cheese they had made in this deal with the dairy industry, and they distributed three hundred million pounds of it to populations that they saw as in need. At the same time, by the way, they're putting cheese in every kind of military like everything the army eats is getting cheese.
If you look images of this stuff, it looks like a brick of plastique, you know, some sort of like explosive putty. It says pasteurized process process not processed. By the way, cheddar cheese keep under refrigeration. And then there's a little sign off purchased and distributed by the United States Department of Agriculture, Washington DC and.
Ian DC cheese.
The idea of you know, maybe it's certainly antiquated now, but I remember growing up it was sort of like a joke kind of thing to talk about people being on government cheese, sort of a crassway referring to maybe people that were less fortunate than others.
Yeah, one hundred percent. There was some insensitivity in those days and in the present day, because the government has once again begun buying up a lot of cheese, and it's entirely because they have to prop up and assist the domestic dairy industry. Public demand for dairy products has declined.
Ben, where do you think the use of the word cheese referring to money came from. Do you think it has anything to do with this whole like we've got way too much cheese situation.
I wonder that is a good question. Let's see, if we're looking at cheese as money slang, maybe it does go back to welfare and assistance. Maybe that's when people started talking about having the cheddar, having the cheese.
Yep, if you look at urban Dictionary.
One of the entries refers to it as slang for money, referring to a form of welfare where people would get government cheese handed out to people in what we're referred to as poverty lines. And I think that's a bit of an antiquated term as well. But cheese comes from the term government cheese, but in slang it's referring to money, because that's where you get your welfare checks as well as that government cheddar.
Makes sense, right, beautiful cheese as cash money you can eat right now. Farmers have so much extra milk that they're reportedly dumping it into fields into lagoons.
Not in the ocean at least, right.
No, oh, and Ben, just doubling back to what you mentioned about the excess milk being dumped into lagoons. These are referred to as anaerobic lagoons and are a way of I believe, storing and treating livestock manure because of the anaerobic ability for it to be broken down by that products.
Yeah, you absolutely nailed it. It's a way to sort of mitigate the waste or the potential for other nasty things to happen when you throw a bunch of animal junk and milk into the environment. So right now the US government has more cheese in its caves than it did when Ronald Reagan was doing his best to give it all away. Big Parma is realss Cheese is awesome. We have to thank everybody who's listening to this in the dairy industry. Thanks for tuning in.
Folks, oh Ben, Before we wrap up it being I believe as this publishes National Cheese Steak Month.
National cheese Steak data is March twenty four.
Okay, we Ben, You and I have traveled to Philadelphia on numerous occasions and have enjoyed authentic Philly cheese steaks. If you're in Philly, you just call it a steak. But the traditional way of eating a Philly steak is with cheese whiz, not with I mean, we love a sharp provolone excellent edition as well, but the classic style is with grilled onions and cheese whiz. Ben, you found a great article that explains the origin of that.
Ah. Yes, the oral history of the Philly cheese steak with Big Big thanks to our pal Victor fiel Real. You can find this on phillymac dot com. It's a fascinating story that might be an episode all its own. We did something about Philly cheese steaks. Was it on ridiculous history?
I think it was. Maybe it just was part of another, a larger broader topic.
But I swear we talked about the history of Philly cheese sticks at some point or another. Because I I know way too much about it. We should look back on that and maybe do an update.
Yeah, I've got to ask you, inquiring minds want to know Noel Max again, condition aside, what's your take? What's the right cheese for a Philly cheese steak.
I don't think I've ever had it with Wiz. I really like it with sharp Provolone. I just think it's a superior cheese. I'm not a huge canned cheese kind of guy, though I do like a craft single melted gently over a delicious smash burger.
How about you Max, with especially it's been.
You're gonna keep going with that? Huh.
I'm gonna beat them both out now.
So folks, folks, we would love to hear your opinions on cheese steaks. I did mess up one time. Nol and our pal Matt Frederick and I were doing a live show in Philadelphia, and at the very end I asked people to recommend which Philly cheese steak shop we should go to, and they were very they were very strident and contradicting opinions.
Right, there's the two kind of you know, classic ones.
There's Pats and then the other one that's right across the street from it. But those are almost like locals think those are sort of like played out, and everyone's gonna have some kind of off the beaten path steak joint that they will recommend. I think Dallassandro's is a popular one, if I'm not missing.
It's the good ones are always some person's name. That's the rule of thumbs.
There, Dallasandro's Steaks and Hogies Philly Slvania.
I have heard really great things about that.
But then if you go to Reddit, someone says, here, Delasandra sucks, go to Angelo's or John's Rose.
Exactly what happened, dude? When I asked people in Philadelphia, you know, I thought they wanted to talk to us about the show, but they were just going, no, beat me your Max, everyone, Na mank you nicks, Na Delesandra.
We like we went to Knicks.
Yeah, so with that, folks, thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Thanks to our research associate Ren, thanks to our super producer mister Max Williams. Who else, who else?
Oh geez, Alex Williams to compose our theme. Christophrasciotis needs Jeff Coates here in spirit.
The Rude Dudes at Ridiculous Crime. Tune in. If you like our show, you'll love theirs. And thanks also, of course to everybody with an opinion of a cheese steak. This episode has made me so hungry. I think we're trending toward lunchtime.
Big time. It is proper lunchtime.
As we wrap this episode up, Ben, thanks for cheasing it.
Up with me, man and also with you.
We'll see you next time, folks.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
