Posts Tagged ‘dairy’
“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”*…
… not so, Americans, who have been, as Millie Giles reports, speaking loudly with their wallets…
Topping off a pizza. Eyeballing a slice for cracker-stacking. Perfecting your own combination for a grilled sandwich. Many of us have spent time ruminating on one of life’s great questions: what’s the right amount of cheese?
The answer turns out to be exactly the same reply you’d give to a Parmesan-doling server: just a little more…
A great report from Bloomberg’s Ilena Peng last week outlined how America’s dairy processors are planning to build new facilities across the US to meet surging demand, which is a headline that could have been from just about any decade in the last 50 years. Indeed, data from the US Department of Agriculture shows that American consumption of cheese amounted to a record-breaking ~42 pounds per year for the average person in 2022, the latest figure available — more than double the amount reported in 1975.
Interestingly, cheese is something of an exception in the world of dairy. As America has sprinkled, grated, and sliced its way through more and more cheese, there’s also been a concurrent 47% decline in fluid milk consumption observed over the same period. In the 20th century, drinking milk was a mainstay of daily life, with its nutritional completeness cementing its place in the American ideal of “growing big and strong” (as well as giving us arguably the best ad campaign of the ‘90s).
Today, a considerable number of people have ditched dairy in favor of plant-based milks like almond, soy, and oat for ethical and dietary reasons (parallel with a counterculture of anti-milk drinking, which some people think is simply “gross”). The boom in alt-milks created a lucrative landscape for fledgling brands like Oatly, which at one point was worth an eye-watering $13 billion (although it is now worth just a tiny fraction of that, some $530 million).
Meanwhile, non-dairy cheeses haven’t taken off in quite the same way. Iterations have struggled to recreate the flavor and texture, with some people, frankly, scarred by sampling a few of these pseudo-cheese attempts, as even VeganCheese.co itself admits.
The discrepancy between these dairy dupes might boil down to one of the unique selling points of regular dairy cheese. As outlined by Bloomberg, the process of making a complex, artisan-derived product from a few simple ingredients, which is hard to do at home, carries weight with an increasingly organic-oriented public.
As well as this, the high protein content of dairy cheese is resonating with a growing number of “gains-conscious” consumers. For example, typically divisive but protein-dense cottage cheese has recently blown up on social media. The longer list of generally viral TikTok recipes also has a very high hit rate for having cheese as a main ingredient.
As Americans dine out more, they may also err on the side of their favorite foods — many of which involve at least some degree of cheese (think: pizza, burgers, pasta)…
Americans eat mozzarella more than any other cheese, with the average citizen getting through 12.55 pounds in 2022, per the USDA.
Consumption of the semi-soft Italian cheese has been sharply on the rise since it knocked cheddar off the top spot back in 2010; though, cheddar has hardly fallen out of favor, with the average person eating over 11 pounds of it each year. Interestingly, processed cheese (think: melty slices) has been mounting a comeback since 2020, after consumption dropped at the turn of the millennium.
What do crude oil and cheese have in common? Not a lot, except that America can’t seem to function without either… and, in recent years, they’ve both become an important American export.
Indeed, while most of America’s favorite cheeses originally derive from elsewhere in the world, the US still makes much of its own supply, accounting for some 29% of the world’s cheese production, second only to the European Union, per the USDA. And, in recent years, it’s started selling more of it abroad.
The US has been a net exporter of cheese since 2010, sending over 450,000 metric tons at its 2022 peak to large international markets like Mexico, where America accounts for 87% of all imported cheese… sales of American cheese abroad are only expected to grow, with the USDA forecasting cheese exports to rise 17% from 2023-24…
… While authentic varieties from places like France and Italy must still be shipped into the country, the US has gone all-in on its own overseas sales. Part of this can be chalked up to the continued drive in global demand for cheese, but the US also has a history of having too much of it lying around.
In 1981, when faced with a milk surplus, the federal government under Ronald Reagan began storing the product as cheese in huge quantities. In fact, the ~560 million pounds of cheese mostly kept in subterranean facilities was at one point costing the government ~$1 million a day in storage and interest costs, according to the Washington Post.
While many countries follow the same food stockpiling rulebook to stabilize prices, a recent surge in milk production, alongside the decline in milk consumption, has meant that America’s cheese pile hasn’t gone anywhere. New, tariff-subsidized deals and a greater national appetite for the yellow stuff have helped… but not by enough. As of August 2024, the total cheese cold in storage holdings in the US was reported to be ~1.4 billion pounds…
More on “Making America Grate Again”: “America is eating, and exporting, more cheese than ever before,” from @chartrdaily.
* G. K. Chesterton
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As we stuff the crust, we might note that today is National Farmers Day in the U.S.
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”*…
Unintended consequences…
The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities. Decades of propping up the dairy industry—by buying up surplus milk and turning it into processed commodity cheese—had backfired, hard.
The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible,” a USDA official was quoted as saying. “Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.”
Instead, they decided to jettison 30 million pounds of it into welfare programs and school lunches through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. “At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their Government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turn into waste,” Reagan said in a written statement. The New York Times declared that the bill would “give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus.”
But the surplus was growing so fast that 30 million pounds barely made a dent. By 1984, the U.S. storage facilities contained 1.2 billion pounds, or roughly five pounds of cheese for every American. “Government cheese,” as the orange blocks of commodity cheese came to be called, wasn’t exactly popular with all of its recipients…
The long, strange saga of ‘government cheese’: “Why Did the U.S. Government Amass More Than a Billion Pounds of Cheese?,” from @DianaHubbell in @atlasobscura.
See also: “How the US Ended Up With Warehouses Full of ‘Government Cheese’,” from @HISTORY (source of the image above).
* G.K. Chesterton
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As we chew on it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1916 that Joseph L. Kraft was grated a United States patent for processed cheese… the very process used to create ‘government cheese.”
Kraft had become curious about an issue that plagued his industry: cheese went bad, very fast, especially in the summer. He hypothesized this was caused by the same bacteria that produced the cheese in the first place. He began experimenting with different heating techniques to destroy the bacteria while preserving the cheesy flavor and consistency; he perfected the process in 1914 and patented it two years later.
Though the cheese industry condemned Kraft’s creation as an abomination, by 1930, 40 percent of all cheese consumed in the United States was made by Kraft.
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”*…
We are on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals ten thousand years ago. This is primarily a protein disruption driven by economics. The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute – more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.
The impact of this disruption on industrial animal farming will be profound. By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. All other livestock industries will suffer a similar fate, while the knock-on effects for crop farmers and businesses throughout the value chain will be severe.
This is the result of rapid advances in precision biology that have allowed us to make huge strides in precision fermentation, a process that allows us to program microorganisms to produce almost any complex organic molecule.
These advances are now being combined with an entirely new model of production we call Food-as-Software, in which individual molecules engineered by scientists are uploaded to databases – molecular cookbooks that food engineers anywhere in the world can use to design products in the same way that software developers design apps. This model ensures constant iteration so that products improve rapidly, with each version superior and cheaper than the last. It also ensures a production system that is completely decentralized and much more stable and resilient than industrial animal agriculture, with fermentation farms located in or close to towns and cities.
This rapid improvement is in stark contrast to the industrial livestock production model, which has all but reached its limits in terms of scale, reach, and efficiency. As the most inefficient and economically vulnerable part of this system, cow products will be the first to feel the full force of modern food’s disruptive power. Modern alternatives will be up to 100 times more land efficient, 10-25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time efficient, and 10 times more water efficient.1,2 They will also produce an order of magnitude less waste.
Modern foods have already started disrupting the ground meat market, but once cost parity is reached, we believe in 2021-23, adoption will tip and accelerate exponentially. The disruption will play out in a number of ways and does not rely solely on the direct, one-for-one substitution of end products. In some markets, only a small percentage of the ingredients need to be replaced for an entire product to be disrupted. The whole of the cow milk industry, for example, will start to collapse once modern food technologies have replaced the proteins in a bottle of milk – just 3.3% of its content. The industry, which is already balancing on a knife edge, will thus be all but bankrupt by 2030.
This is not, therefore, one disruption but many in parallel, with each overlapping, reinforcing, and accelerating one another. Product after product that we extract from the cow will be replaced by superior, cheaper, modern alternatives, triggering a death spiral of increasing prices, decreasing demand, and reversing economies of scale for the industrial cattle farming industry, which will collapse long before we see modern technologies produce the perfect, cellular steak…
A provocative look at the (or at least a plausible) future of food and agriculture. Read the full report here (email registration required).
As to what’s happening in the meantime…
• Undocumented ship-to-ship transfers funnel illegal, unreported, and unregulated fish to market. It’s probably worse than we thought: “Clandestine Fish Handoffs.”
• With a new California Cattle Council now in play, the state’s beef producers will up the ante in research and education: “California cattle producers beef up state’s cattle business” [source of the image above].
• “Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice“
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As we dig in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that Teressa Bellissimo, at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, created Buffalo Hot Wings as a snack for her son and several of his college friends. Her “invention”– an unbreaded chicken wing section (flat or drumette), generally deep-fried then coated or dipped in a sauce consisting of a vinegar-based cayenne pepper hot sauce and melted butter, and served with with celery and carrot sticks and with blue cheese dressing or ranch dressing for dipping– has become a barroom and fast food staple… and has inspired a plethora of “Buffalo” dishes (other fried foods with dipping sauces).
“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them”*…
… So humans won’t play a significant role in the spreading of intelligence across the cosmos. But that’s OK. Don’t think of humans as the crown of creation. Instead view human civilization as part of a much grander scheme, an important step (but not the last one) on the path of the universe towards higher complexity. Now it seems ready to take its next step, a step comparable to the invention of life itself over 3.5 billion years ago.
This is more than just another industrial revolution. This is something new that transcends humankind and even biology. It is a privilege to witness its beginnings, and contribute something to it…
Jürgen Schmidhube— of whom it’s been said, “When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’” — shares the reasoning behind his almost breathless anticipation of intelligence-to-come: “Falling Walls: The Past, Present and Future of Artificial Intelligence.”
Then, for a different perspective on (essentially) the same assumption about the future, read Slavoj Žižek’s “Bladerunner 2049: A View of Post-Human Capitalism.”
* Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth
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As we welcome our computer overlords, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that Henry W. Jeffries invented the Rotolactor. Housed in the Lactorium of the Walker Gordon Laboratory Company, Inc., at Plainsboro, N.J., it was a 50-stall revolving platform that enabled the milking of 1,680 cows in seven hours by rotating them into position with the milking machines. A spiffy version of the Rotolactor, displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the Borden building as part of the “Dairy World of Tomorrow,” was one of the most popular attractions in the Fair’s Food Zone.
“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”*…
Americans eat 35 pounds of cheese per year on average—a record amount, more than double the quantity consumed in 1975. And yet that demand doesn’t come close to meeting U.S. supply: The cheese glut is so massive (1.3 billion pounds in cold storage as of May 31) that on two separate occasions, in August and October of last year, the federal government announced it would bail out dairy farmers by purchasing $20 million worth of surplus for distribution to food pantries. Add to that a global drop in demand for dairy, plus technology that’s making cows more prolific, and you have the lowest milk prices since the Great Recession ended in 2009. Farmers poured out almost 50 million gallons of unsold milk last year—actually poured it out, into holes in the ground—according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In an August 2016 letter, the National Milk Producers Federation begged the USDA for a $150 million bailout…
There exists a little-known, government-sponsored marketing group called Dairy Management Inc.(DMI), whose job it is to squeeze as much milk, cheese, butter, and yogurt as it can into food sold both at home and abroad. Until recently, the “Got Milk?” campaign was its highest-impact success story. But for the past eight years, the group has been the hidden hand guiding most of fast food’s dairy hits—a kind of Illuminati of cheese—including and especially the [Taco Bell] Quesalupa…
Amid an historic glut, a secretive, government-sponsored entity is putting cheese anywhere it can stuff it: “The Mad Cheese Scientists Fighting to Save the Dairy Industry.”
* G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions
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As we opt for the stuffed crust, we might spare a thought for Charles Elmer Hires; he died on this date in 1937. A Quaker pharmacist, introduced root beer to the world at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. A committed member of the Temperance Movement, Hires saw his drink (the original formula included sarsaparilla, sasafras, ginger, pipsissewa, wintergreen, and juniper, among other flavoring ingredients) as an alternative to alcohol, and dubbed it “the temperance drink” and “the greatest health-giving beverage in the world.” Hires was inspired by root tea, but thought that “beer” would be a more attractive name to “the working class.”
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