What are the origins of our favorite cheeses? Which variety of cheese is the oldest? Which ancestral peoples first concocted cheese? Why? What is cheese?
(This is the first portion of a six-part series on cheese.)
Part I: Genesis
The modern word “cheese” derives from the Middle English “chese,” which comes from the Anglian [Old English] “cēse.” The Anglian people (those “of the Angles”) were the original Germanics who relocated to the British Isles after the Roman period.
The Romans had experimented with hard cheese, as a ration for their legionary soldiers. The term they used for this cheese was “formaticum,” routed from “caseus formatus” (meaning “formed; molded cheese”). From “formaticum” came the French word “fromage,” the Breton “fourmaj,” and the Italian “formaggio.” From “caseus” came the Spanish “queso.”
Cheesemaking preceded the Roman Era. During his time, Pliny the Elder wrote of how sophisticated the cheesemaking profession was. Despite the flourishing Roman cheese industry, Pliny preferred the cheese that was imported from Bithynia in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey).
Pliny the Elder, the original hipster.
The origin of the cheesemaking process is uncertain, though it is evident that the process existed for millennia preceding the Roman Empire. It is assumed that cheesemaking began somewhere in Europe, the Middle East, or Central Asia. Most historians presume that cheese originated sometime around 8,000 BC, when sheep were first domesticated, though the earliest evidence for cheesemaking comes from Kujawy, Poland, dated at roughly 5,500 BC.
The historical consensus is that cheese was first created on accident. Those some-odd ten-thousand years ago, a wary sheep herder or nomad (or Arab trader, as one legend says) was using an inflated animal stomach as a portable storage container for their milk and scavenged food. The rennet in the stomach curdled the stored milk, turning it into curds and whey. By chance, cheese had been created. This process was reverse-engineered and recreated by curious humans, and cheesemaking became henceforth a new aspect of the human experience.
My grandfather, a naturalist chiropractor, banned cheese and all dairy products from his household. He believed that dairy gummed up the human body’s precious machinery. In his eyes, just because humans stumbled upon cheesemaking doesn’t mean that humans are supposed to be eating cheese; we haven’t adapted for it — it is not “necessary,” as our bodies do not require it.
This is going to be very upsetting for you to hear, but it must be said: bone strength does not come from drinking milk or eating cheese. Advertisers lie, proverbs are folklore, and cow milk does not make your bones healthy.
Contrary to popular belief [and advertisements], bone strength does not come from consuming milk and other dairy products—it comes from eating plants. Dairy has been, at best, inconsequential to the human body; at its worst, it’s physically distressing and obscenely acidic, thanks to the bacteria that curdles it to become cheese.
Heavy consumption of dairy makes us slower, congested and sluggish. Dairy increases our body’s mucus generation, making us ooze on the inside. As the mucus is flushed from our system, our joints become stiff, and possibly arthritic. We may get headaches or body aches; through dairy, we are introduced to more bacteria, pesticides, and an oversupply of hormones.
Notably, digestive issues are a result of dairy’s chemical makeup and our resultant overproduction of mucus. Lactose intolerance, as it's known, is when your small intestine lacks the enzyme known as “lactase,” which is used to dissolve lactose (a type of sugar found in milk) into glucose (a type of sugar the body will absorb). It is thought that roughly 65% of people have a discernable intolerance to lactose.
Nevertheless, humans are addicted to dairy products: the sweetness, the creamy texture, and the gentle complimentary pairings they provide. Our palette animalistically craves those “healthy fats” that we can store on our bodies for cold and lonely periods of hunger.
We burn fat when we’re struggling to survive. Our animal tissues oxidize sugars and fats to access the glucose, which is a simple yet significant source of energy for our body’s cells. The carnivorous stomach separates fats from meats, breaks the fats down into glucose, delivers the glucose unto the bloodstream, and transmits that simple energy throughout the body — keeping you alive. And the larger an animal’s brain is, the more glucose it needs to operate. (The infamous pancreas creates insulin, which regulates the glucose levels in your bloodstream [so that your brain doesn't starve or flood, which could kill you] — but now is not the time for a diabetes-related informative tangent.)
Humans have been in pursuit of this particular creamy and accessible flavor parade of lactose-glucose since Ancient Egypt. Archaeologists have found murals depicting cheeses on the inner walls of tombs over four thousand years old. They suggest that these early adventures in cheesemaking were crumbly and considerably sour.
Unlike the Middle East, ye olde Europe’s more temperate climate meant less salt was needed to preserve the cheese. Thus they were able to experiment with more bacteria and mold in production, granting ancient cheesemakers the ability to chart an oral odyssey. Many now-distinct flavors owe their existence to the monkeyshines of archaic humans who tooled around with mold spores and curdling milk in the dank, dark caves of Europe.
By the first century AD—during the time of cheese connoisseur and prophetic early-blogger Pliny the Elder—cheesemaking was an artform with a sophisticated process. With such a large empire at hand, the Romans had an impressive variety of cheeses available to them. Legend says that the cheeses of the Alps are as good today as they were for Pliny the Elder.
As their empire expanded, and Roman peoples mingled with unaffiliated European settlements, and they did what any new neighbor would do: they swapped recipes. Tribal traditions were blended, creating even more niches and variations of cheese. Soon, those recipes became their own traditions, and small towns across Europe would evolve a unique cheesemaking ethos all their own.
Early Christian monasteries adopted cheesemaking as a method of getting by, for penance and survival. Since monks often tended wondrous gardens, the ecological quirks of their well-traveled, strange flowers offered their cheeses a taste of new molds and bacteria. European cheese diversity was doubled down upon by friars.
Nowadays, Great Britain alone has almost 700 different registered cheeses, according to the British Cheese Board. Fifteen of these cheeses have their reputations protected by the crown. France has fifty protected cheese heritages of its own. Spain and Italy together protect another 72.
France may be the country most people think of when they hear the word “cheese” (owed to their romanticized relationship with the curd), yet France only produces just above half as many distinct local cheeses as Great Britain produces. That’s not to say “home of four hundred kinds of cheese” isn’t an impressive thing to put on a business card… You could make a Page-a-Day calendar of French cheeses. In fact, in France, an old adage among countrymen says that there’s a unique cheese for every day of the year.
Charles de Gaulle—the Greatest Frenchman of All Time; indefatigable adversary for Nazis and uncontested ten-year president of the nation—once mused “how can one govern a country in which there are 246 kinds of cheese?” The idea was that if you can measure France by its cheese variations, you’ll find that the country is comprised of 246 regions, with each holding a unique history—their own little microcosm—and yet all of them are, for some reason, under one flag; controlled by one government. (De Gaulle felt that cheese was a poignant way to express national diversity.)
Cheesemaking developed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Particularly impressive recipes spread, becoming the foundation for scores of other recipes. Many of these foundational recipes were marked by ancient historians and scribes, with mentions going back to the 1500s and earlier.
Eastern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the pre-Columbian Americas were still blissfully unaware of cheese. None of their peoples had accidentally stored milk for too long in rendered animal stomachs—or, if they had, they thought it gross and never told their friends.
Deep trade routes across the Eurasian continent kept everywhere from Gaul to the Indus River Valley to the Indian province in the loop with cheese. The art of cheesemaking flourished for centuries before European imperialism spread the wonders of cultured dairy products around the world. By 1815, the Swiss were already producing cheese in factory settings.
By 1851, a dairy farmer from upstate New York had established a consortium with the neighboring farms; together, they created cheese via assembly line. The dairy product had become another pillar of manufacturing during the Second Industrial Revolution, with hundreds of similar factories being built across America.
This made procuring huge batches of rennet imperative. Mass-production of calf vomit wasn’t efficient enough, so—by the Belle Époque—scientists were able to produce pure microbial cultures. This meant that curdling bacteria didn’t have to be resupplied from old batches of whey, because some people now had the sole job of making thirsty microorganisms reproduce en masse.
With a controlled and consistent microbial culture, manufactured cheese was dependably true to the intended historic taste (assuming the aging process wasn’t fucked up by Kevin, again). Once manufacturing could reliably reproduce the perfect cheese culture, the expedience of its process outpaced the romanticism of traditional cheesemaking. During World War II, the dependence on factories for mass-producing foodstuffs rang the death knell for traditional cheesemaking; a dozen-millennia-old pillar of human heritage had been delegated to machines.
Factories have been the primary producer of standardized cheese ever since we killed Hitler.
In 2014, whole cow milk produced 18.7 million tons of cheese worldwide. The United States produced 5.4 million, or 29%, of that cheese.
When Mike Tyson boxed, he clocked in at 240 lbs. — The weight of the cheese that America alone produced in 2014 is equivalent to 45 million Mike Tysons.
Another 20 million Mike Tysons’ worth of cheese came from skimmed cow milk (which is just the less-tasty, less-nutritious version of milk, thanks to the removal of the tasty, tasty cream).
Just over five and a half million Mike Tysons’ worth of cheese came from sheep milk. That’s right: sheep get milked.
Almost four and a half million Mike Tysons’ worth of cheese came from goat milk; the leading producer in 2014 was—you guessed it—South Sudan!
Nearly two and a half million Mike Tysons’ worth of cheese came from buffalo milk. Someone in Egypt has the job of milking buffalo. Isn’t that impressive?
These buffalo milkers—and the few cheese artisans who remain in our internet-of-things culture—passionately toil for the curd, producing ounces of sweet, creamy cheese for each us to suckle upon — even if we're lactose intolerant and it shoots right through our digestive tract, as such it is with my wife.
Would you live a life without curds? Little Miss Muffet couldn't; her life revolves around bowls of cheese, and tuffets. My wife couldn't; she’d rather eternally forgo oral sex.
A life with no whey? No way.
