In South Dakota, it is illegal to fall asleep in a cheese factory. Apparently, there are five of those factories there. I can only imagine what may have sparked this law, as I didn’t locate its origin. If I were a betting woman, I’d say it had something to do with the Swiss Cheese.
The “world’s largest single-site cheese and whey products manufacturing facility” is the Hilmar Cheese Factory in Hilmar, California. They sell cheese to cheese businesses. It is legal to catch a few winks there as far as I know. But I imagine management might frown upon falling asleep at the cheese wheel.
When used in the slang sense, when something is “cheesy,” it is unintentionally kitschy. Tacky. Or maybe even poor in quality. There is a lot of cheesy in the world today, it seems.
But on the dairy side of cheesy? There are more than 2000 varieties of cheese in the world. Who knew. Mozzarella is the favorite all around this planet of ours, and it is the most consumed. I’m guessing pizza has a heck of a lot to do with this. Not so much with those Caprese salads. To illustrate my point, Pizza Hut is the largest cheese-using fast food place. The Hut uses approximately 300 million pounds of cheese annually.
But the people who eat the most cheese per capita are the Greeks. An average person from Greece consumes more than 60 pounds of cheese every year. Most of that is feta cheese.
Even still, it seems that everyone loves a good cheese thing. Surprisingly to me, cheese production around the globe is more than the combined worldwide production of coffee, tobacco, tea, and cocoa beans.
I’ve written about cheese before, and I’m not sure why I’m coming back to it again. But this time, I wondered how exactly cheese is made. It is a little bit like that horrible lumpy milk in the back of the refrigerator, two weeks past the date.
Here’s loosely how it goes. The reason expired milk becomes “cheesy” is that bacteria in the milk grow rapidly when milk hangs around too long. The bacteria digest the sugar in the milk, which is lactose. When this happens, lactic acid is produced. Lactic acid causes the protein in the milk to curdle. You know. Those nasty smelling lumps. Blech.
And, pretty much, cheese is made the same way. By curdling milk. Except in the case of the cheesemakers, the milk is curdled on purpose. I won’t review all the steps. But we all get the gist of things.
It is amazing to me that something so foul and rancid can turn into something so ultimately delicious. We’ve dedicated entire fondues to honor the cheeses.
But as you consider this, we could take a lesson from cheese. Sometimes, in our lives, things go a little bit sour. Sometimes a lot.
I was talking to someone today about why bad things happen. Why certain events in our lives occur, with such rancid surroundings. And I came across the process of cheese.
Perhaps those “bad” things in life are ways of making something better. We may not see it at first. It may just be the same feeling as sticking our noses in that putrid carton of milk. But with time and the ensuing life circumstances, that bad thing may serve a greater purpose. In the end, it may produce a worthwhile result.
They say that every person we meet is here to teach us a lesson. And sometimes we cannot see the Swiss Cheese for the holes. But it is there.
So. We curdle our milk. We make our cheese. And the lessons we learn will hopefully make us better. Cheese The Day.
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“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton
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“What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?”
― Bertolt Brecht
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“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
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There’s more to cheese than you think. Stinky.
