Moreover, to boost the usage at home, the dairy aisle has been loaded with cheese made more and more convenient for use in recipes. The key to this makeover is the product called processed cheese, which Kraft pioneered nearly a century ago and which fueled its rise to the position of America’s largest manufacturer of cheese, with annual global sales of $7-billion. Some of this effort is focused on changing its physical nature, converting cheese into a form that is durable as well as quick and cheap to produce. It is the direct result of concerted efforts by the processed food industry, which has labored long and hard to transform the very essence of cheese and its role in our diet. The soaring amounts of cheese we eat is no accident. Day in and day out, Americans on average are exceeding the recommended maximum of fat by more than 50%. Cheese has become the single largest source of saturated fat in the American diet, though it is hardly the only culprit. Those 33 pounds also have as many as 3,100 grams of saturated fat, or more than half a year’s recommended maximum intake. Depending on the specific product, 33 pounds of cheese delivers as many as 60,000 calories, which is enough energy, on its own, to sustain an adult for a month. The nutritional math, when it comes to cheese, is staggering too. America’s intake of cheese, by contrast, continues to swell, increasing three pounds per person per year since 2001. During that same time, beverage makers managed only to double the per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks to 50 gallons a year in fact, in recent years they have seen a drop-off, as consumers switched to other sugary drinks. Taken together, however, the effort by Kraft and its smaller competitors to recast and expand the traditional provision known as cheese has achieved stunning results.Īmericans now eat as much as 33 pounds or more of cheese and pseudo-cheese products a year, triple the amount we consumed in the early 1970s. Federal regulators have resorted to terms like cheese food, cheese product, and pasteurized processed American to describe what the industry itself loosely calls cheese. Granted, many of these items - Easy Cheese, Velveeta, American Singles, Philadelphia Cooking Creme, and a group of blends called Philadelphia Shredded Cheese, which combine real cheese with cream cheese - defy definition. When I asked how much, she declined to say Article content A spokeswoman told me there was still some cheese left in the formula, just not as much as there used to be. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Now, he discovered, not only was cheese no longer prominently listed as an ingredient, it wasn’t listed at all. Real cheese gave it class and legitimacy, Southworth said, not to mention flavor. From its earliest days, Cheez Whiz always contained real cheese. One crucial ingredient was missing, however. There were 27 items listed in all, starting with the watery by-product of milk called whey, taking him through canola oil, corn syrup, and an additive called milk protein concentrate, which manufacturers had begun importing from other countries as a cost-cutting alternative to the higher-priced powdered milk produced by American dairies. Staring at the label, parsing the list of ingredients, he eventually found the culprit, though not without some effort.
Nonetheless, in his kitchen that day, Southworth knew that something had changed. Upon its release on July 1, 1953, the advertising emphasized its expediency, not its taste: “Cheese treats QUICK. In the laboratories at Kraft, in fact, Cheez Whiz had been designed to have the mildest flavor possible for the broadest public appeal. But it hadn’t pretended, even wanted to be. Article contentĪs for its taste, Southworth conceded that the spread had never been in the same league as a fine English Stilton.
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