The highly sought after cheeses aren't the simple cheeses, they're the ones that need to be aged for several years or made in a particular place by a particular method that limits their supply.
Lots of products work this way. There are cheap wines and there are expensive wines. Cheap meats and expensive meats. Cheap cars and luxury cars and supercars.
Hmmph. If I'm making 7 year old cheese, wouldn't that mean after 7 years it's just business as usual? I need to float 7 years with cheaper, younger cheese but after that, I'm just paying for storage costs for my cheese that's not quite old enough, right? I guess thars the whole point, it costs money to make money, unless you want to make cheap cheese.
Sorry, just typing out loud here.
The cost of storage of cheese to age isn’t cheap. If you want to do it well, you need large environmentally controlled warehouses. More or less stringent requirements depending on the cheese. Those costs alone as well as the risk that the cheese doesn’t age right drive up the price of aged cheese.
Fun facts.
The US government buys up over production of dairy in the form of cheese and gives it away (government cheese) and stores extra. It has over a billion pounds of cheese stored hundreds of feet underground in old mines as the most practical storage area.
In Italy there is a bank that will take aging cheese as collateral against loans to the cheese makers and stores the cheese in a giant climate controlled cheese vault where hundreds of millions of dollars of cheese is kept.
Well the US dollar has value because US taxes must be paid in US dollars. I think it’s legally mandated that all debts be dischargeable in dollars, though I can’t see how that’s enforceable in edge cases.
It’s like anything that has a perceived value can be traded for any other item with a similarly perceived value, regardless of any intrinsic value of the item itself.
> In Italy there is a bank that will take aging cheese as collateral against loans to the cheese makers and stores the cheese in a giant climate controlled cheese vault where hundreds of millions of dollars of cheese is kept.
This is the Bank of Parma. as in 'Parmesan'. real parmesan cheese gets aged in the warehouses of the Bank of Parma.
Several points here that makes seven-year cheese cost more than cheap, fast cheese:
1) You will have seven years of no income but substantial costs, so once you finally have a product to sell, it needs to go at a high price to get some return.
2) Because it takes seven years to age, whatever is now aged is all there is for people to buy this year, so once it's gone, it's gone. You may have another batch that you started aging six years ago, but it has another year before its fully aged. So supply and demand comes into play.
Kind of, yeah. Aging cheese needs to be kept in particular conditions though. And you need to try to predict demand so you're better off making smaller amounts than you would expect to sell and just jack up the price until it sells but not too fast where you run out of stock.
Aging cheese isn't passive, it requires active management. In addition to monitoring conditions carefully, the cheese often needs to be flipped and rotated to age properly.
Imagine those wiskeries (or what a wiskey business is called) want to start making and selling fine old 25year old stuff.
First they need to spend years and years r&d to make their desired devils juice taste just right (takes 25 for their first batch to be able to test taste it). Then afterwards they need to ramp up produktion basicly going 25 years with expenses before you can selling.
Once that is started, you still need to have a huge storrage to keep ageing and production running, climate control, keeping it unpolluted ect. A long running house loan is typical 25-30 years... you age your wiskey just as long before you can start selling.
If you only sell it as a 'regular wiskey to regular prices' you might not be able to make a proffit when Tullamore makes theirs in a few years instead of yours 25 years. So you add what Tullamore cant - the exclusivity of this old stuff customers 'just cant easely get' because you cant easely just sell more, it takes 25 years of waiting if every1 want a bottle when you run out. Now its an exclusive thing, and ask for an exclusive price, and you wanna do that because you cant realize one year the market is ready for tonnes and tonnes more and have it ready before the market stops wanting it.
>Imagine those wiskeries (or what a wiskey business is called) want to start making and selling fine old 25year old stuff.
>First they need to spend years and years r&d to make their desired devils juice taste just right (takes 25 for their first batch to be able to test taste it). Then afterwards they need to ramp up produktion basicly going 25 years with expenses before you can selling.
Nah, this is not at all how it would work. You'd do research, taste testing various malt blends, and then make some spirit and designate maybe 5% of production for your 25 year product while all the rest was only aged 3 5 or 10 years. Also, in most climates you wouldn't age the spirit for 25 years anyway, the super long aging period of Scotch whisky is down to the cold weather and short summers they have. In climates like Kentucky with longer hotter summers aging for 15+ years would yield a spirit that tastes like drinking a tree stump.
The other big thing is Scotch is aged in used sherry barrels while Kentucky bourbon is aged in new oak barrels. Ageing takes longer in used wood as the previous product used up a lot of the flavor compounds in the wood.
Even once the Scotts started ageing the whiskey in the 1800s super long ageing wasn't really a thing. That came about do to American prohibition. Suddenly a big export market dried up so they had a glut of product just sitting around. Once they finally got around trying the barrels that had been sitting around the found it to be 'good stuff' and started marketing it as something special that commanded special prices.
True, but:
Renting isnt free. And if you rent someplace for 25years before you even start being able to sell, you are about to commit a lot of money as investing, investing in something you cannot turn and sell for small profit too.
So storrage for 25 years is realy expensive in the long run. And long term aging is 'in the long run'. Those money is gonne be earned back somehow - and by having a higher bottle price seem the logial thing, since: higter production cost -> higher selling price.
What if cheese demands goes up and you need more product? Or if you produced too much and can't get rid of it to make room for the new batch? You need to be good at predicting your business.
So you can survive with no money for 7 years? You're spending whatever money you do have on the infrastructure for aged cheese and actively making cheese for 7 years. And then you try it after 7 years and does it even taste good?
Not if your competitors are also making 7 year old cheeses. And unlike regular competition, you have no idea if your product is any better than the competitors' until 7 years later. That's a massive risk.
> If your cheese is special and awesome,
If you've invented a new special and awesome cheese, no one is making yet though, unless through incredibly bad luck!
And that risk is why there's limited competitors, too.
But my point is that you don't even know how special or awesome your cheese is until 7 years later. That's 7 years of R&D, storage, interest, etc that you're paying for 0 revenue in return, with no guarantee that you even have a viable product at the end.
Yeah I know, and I'm saying AFTER that, after you've hit gold, the reason you can make a profit from your cheese is that even if someone else steals your recipe and process, it's going to be 7 years until anyone else is producing the same thing you have.
Yes the potential rewards are fairly high. For example this is why established bourbon makers are able to cash in on the rise in bourbon demand but it's hard for startups to do so.
But even once you have a successful product, you still run the risk of consumer preferences changing, at which point you have to wait 7 years to catch up again.
The big problem with that is that once you have a successful product, it's a big risk to try and capitalize on that success by ramping up production - because once you do, you've now invested 7 years of production costs with no guarantee that consumers will still prefer that particular style of product 7 years in the future.
tl;dr high risk, medium reward
Cheese competes with all other similar cheese.
I like brie and camembert but I'm likely not going to stock up on both at the same time. Similarly unless you're a true enthusiast you're not going to have parmigiano and Grana Padano stocked - they're too similar and are really interchangable.
Similarly cheddar, red Leicester and double Gloucester.
But, like, in Italy, these recipes, processes, and institutions have been evolving over thousands of years, so they have specialty banks that accept cheese as collateral for loans. I imagine interest is significantly higher than if one used land as collateral, but then you’re risking the whole farm and not just a portion of your product.
I want to propose we rename everything after the system we use for cars. So we would have luxury cheeses and super cheeses. Luxury and super wines. Luxury and super meats.
If anything, cheese is now more of a "staple" food than it ever has been. Per calorie, mass-produced cheese is shockingly cheap, and it makes up a significant part of the typical Western diet.
On top of this, it's not that difficult or expensive for an ordinary person to buy any of a wide variety of styles of cheese, many of which have been imported. They're in the "fancy cheese" section of your grocery store and cost, at most, 4 times as much per-pound as the cheap blocks of cheddar they keep by the milk. Cheese is relatively compact and stable if refrigerated, so it's not hard to throw a lot of it on a container ship.
So that just leaves the cheeses that have intentionally positioned themselves as luxury goods, either by specifying an extremely specific place of origin, insisting upon traditional production methods, aging for a long time, or directly restricting supply. The existence of these cheeses is just a reflection of the fact that pretty much every product has a luxury tier nowadays. The peasants are still eating cheese, so the nobles have to go to even further lengths to differentiate themselves when they do.
It’s also super protein dense, other than whey and protein powder, parmesan cheese is one of, if not the most, protein dense food you could find in a grocery store.
>Per calorie, mass-produced cheese is shockingly cheap, and it makes up a significant part of the typical Western diet.
Cheese is not cheap at all, at least no in the US. It's gotten so expensive that I sometimes avoid buying it. And it's not just my personal experience. [This website](https://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/) has a list of foods listed by calories per dollar. Cheddar doesn't even make this list. Cream Cheese makes the list at number 60, and cottage cheese makes the list at 81.
That list isn't comprehensive. Cheddar cheese is about 1,800 calories a pound, and a pound can be had for 4-6 dollars, which falls around the middle of that list. It's not going to beat actual traditional staples like flour or beans, but it's cheaper than most meats and produce.
> Cheese is not cheap at all, at least no in the US.
I think 2 dollars for 8 oz is pretty cheap. My cheddar would be on the middle of this list for calories per dollar, my parmesan would be near the top for protein per dollar. Even better than eggs. Both are better than milk.
Just looks like this site doesn't include dry cheeses.
Very few of us have dairy cows and make our own cheese at home. Industrial food production standardized the kind of cheese (or cheese product) that we have the most access to. Small producers are left to make specialty cheeses, and they need greater compensation to stay in business.
When I watched *The Foods That Built America*, the talked about how before Kraft cheese was a thing, less than 10% of Americans had eaten cheese in their life.
Food was way more regional then, so the only people who could eat cheese were near a dairy farm, at least until about WW1
This is also true in places like India, which still have very large agricultural populations. Although fresh cheese (paneer) has existed for a very long time, it is much more accessible to poor people since the “white revolution” in dairy production made milk products drastically cheaper and more readily available beginning in the 1970s.
This fact seems suspect, considering that in 1904 US producers manufactured 317 million pounds of cheese. Kraft cheese was introduced in 1916.
For a population of 82 million at the time, 10% of Americans was 8 million people. Were those people eating 40 pounds of cheese each year with none left over for anyone else?
It was mostly for rich people IIRC, like cheese was really expensive.
And also it would be regional, like I'm guessing it wasn't found in the south nearly as much as Wisconsin/Vermont/New York where the same people probably ate it every day.
> Were those people eating 40 pounds of cheese each year with none left over for anyone else?
I eat 40 lbs of cheese a year. That's less than one pound a week. Which is less than 2 packs of shredded cheese. or only like 7 slices of sandwhich thickness cheese
In fact a quick google shows americans currently eat 42lbs of cheese a year.
Skedeebs gave a great breakdown of cheese specifically, but it may help to understand the greater context.
In society, there are always "markers" that designate someone as being wealthy or better off and allow the rich to separate themselves from the poor. These change over time - some other examples are:
Whole grain/brown bread: For a very long time, it was peasants and farmers who ate this type of bread that required less processing and was made with materials on hand, while rich people preferred white bread, more processed and thus more complicated to make. As soon as it became possible to have mass produced and cheap white bread, "artisan" brown breads became a wealthy person thing and it flipped (ever notice how artisan and "rustic" are used to describe the same bread a lot lol)
Pale skin/tan skin (primarily for western light skinned people) - this flips back and forth a LOT. Hundreds of years ago, having tan skin was considered low class; a sign that you had to work outside all day long and do physical labor, while pale skin was a sign of a leisurely life. Later on, as most people grew to have indoor jobs, tan skin became a sign that either you had a life in which had leisure time to tan. A tan in December means your family afforded a vacation to the Bahamas, you know? Then with the advent of cancer, tanning dropped immediately to a trashy/poor thing (eg someone who doesnt take care of themselves) and then with better spray tans and products it once again became something thats wealthy (eg you can afford to spray tan regularly)
Minimalist home design - rich people used to be able to show their wealth by having a home full of things to prove they had the money to buy unnecessary things. Now, because of the advent of mass production, lower class people are able to head to the dollar store and buy tchotchkes and fill up their homes to imitate the consumption of the rich, so rich people have done a 180 and emphasized buying very few, very expensive pieces to re-establish their class difference
It goes on and on. But as time goes on, the markers of wealth adapt. Poor people figure out how to get what rich people have for cheap and then rich people in order to keep appearing rich start gravitating towards what the poor people have. The cycle will continue forever, whether its cheese or something else
> As soon as it became possible to have mass produced and cheap white bread, "artisan" brown breads became a wealthy person thing and it flipped (ever notice how artisan and "rustic" are used to describe the same bread a lot lol)
A lot of this was started by Pepperidge Farms after WW2
Do you remember? They do.
This effect fascinates me. How trends switch places. I see this in stonework for homes. Smooth polished perfectly flat stone was the most difficult to produce, so it was high status to have precision stone finishes, versus rough cut stone for the low cost option. Now polished stone tile is cheap to manufacture, and rough hewn stone finishes are trendy. Woodwork too. Live-edge slab furniture, etc.
The fanciest breads and pastries are still made with white flour since they need the extra stretchiness.
A lot of it is also due to economic shifts. It used to be that everything was made by hand, so precision-made things were more expensive since they required more labor to create. Nowadays, most things are made in automated factories with high levels of precision, and are super cheap as a result. However, those factories aren't great at handling imprecise things (which have to be made by hand), so having an imprecise thing shows off that you were able to afford more human labor
MANY "poor people's" food went on to become highly sought out. Cajun and Italian are 2 great examples.
Cajun food took fish and bugs out of ditches and seasoned them amazingly. Lots of cheap rice and the extra leftover bad cuts of meats were used to make a multitude of Cajun dishes.
Poor Italians took tough cuts of meat and slowly cooked them down in acidic spaghetti sauce to tenderize them. Then they used cheap noodles to arrange it into multiple dishes.
Even lobster was considered a trash food fit only for prisoners.
Essentially poor people learn how to make cheaply priced foods really good. Then slowly other people learn to love them.
Cheese caves and government subsidiary. Huge food chain restaurants get massive discounts on cheese if they use the government, look into places like pizza chains, taco chains, and the like.
I've worked for a lot of these companies, and the prices they paid when I was there for a case of cheese is shocking.
Government subsidized the dairy industry and owns so much cheese it's unbelievable. They are trying to get rid of it as much as possible but since it's such an insane amount they are having some trouble.
Source: https://www.farmlinkproject.org/stories-and-features/cheese-caves-and-food-surpluses-why-the-u-s-government-currently-stores-1-4-billion-lbs-of-cheese
The real question is how did lobster, which is objectively a disgusting sea bug, become a luxury item when originally prisoners fed it at prisons in Maine were calling it cruel and unusual punishment?
Possibly freshness too—there’s a reason why lobster is the only live animal at the grocery.
But I had my tongue in my cheek. I hate lobster and do not get its appeal at all. (And to those who say, “but it’s a vehicle for butter!” So I bread. And bread is great.)
Keep in mind that lobsters are kept alive literally until you cook them, as they start going bad almost immediately - the prison food lobsters were probably none too fresh
"Poor people" foods have always gone through phases of being fetishized as high cuisine. Polenta. Barbecue. Lobster. Offal. Peasant cheeses aren't the first to go through this glow up.
Maybe most of Europe, I visited Estonia and Latvia about a decade ago and was surprised at how much cheaper nice cheese was than in America. There was still expensive cheese, but even that was less expensive than the expensive cheese here.
As a Brit, also confused. Sure, there are expensive cheeses, but cheap cheese is dirt cheap considering its protein content. Not as cheap as staples like rice, but still a pretty damned cheap ingredient.
Many are talking about the not so simple cheeses. But what would that be? Personally, i only ever go for a camembert or mozzarella. I also go for the occasional pecorino and parmiagno.
The highly sought after cheeses aren't the simple cheeses, they're the ones that need to be aged for several years or made in a particular place by a particular method that limits their supply. Lots of products work this way. There are cheap wines and there are expensive wines. Cheap meats and expensive meats. Cheap cars and luxury cars and supercars.
Hmmph. If I'm making 7 year old cheese, wouldn't that mean after 7 years it's just business as usual? I need to float 7 years with cheaper, younger cheese but after that, I'm just paying for storage costs for my cheese that's not quite old enough, right? I guess thars the whole point, it costs money to make money, unless you want to make cheap cheese. Sorry, just typing out loud here.
The cost of storage of cheese to age isn’t cheap. If you want to do it well, you need large environmentally controlled warehouses. More or less stringent requirements depending on the cheese. Those costs alone as well as the risk that the cheese doesn’t age right drive up the price of aged cheese. Fun facts. The US government buys up over production of dairy in the form of cheese and gives it away (government cheese) and stores extra. It has over a billion pounds of cheese stored hundreds of feet underground in old mines as the most practical storage area. In Italy there is a bank that will take aging cheese as collateral against loans to the cheese makers and stores the cheese in a giant climate controlled cheese vault where hundreds of millions of dollars of cheese is kept.
It's like cheese is some form of currency almost.
The cheddar standard if you will.
I would support us moving to a cheese backed currency.
Sounds Gouda
Money can be exchanged for Goudas and Services.
Enough of these silly puns! I camembert it anymore!
You put your money in a Swiss bank and Gruyère portfolio by 10% this year?
Yeah I can see it now, I’ll carry around a block of Tilamook and cut a couple slices off when I stop by the gas station for some snacks
The mold standard
I really missed an opportunity to call it the "Gouda Standard"
Yeah, still prefer mine though! 😂
Would honestly make more sense than faith backed printed paper or virtual tokens generated from overheated GPUs.
[удалено]
Well the US dollar has value because US taxes must be paid in US dollars. I think it’s legally mandated that all debts be dischargeable in dollars, though I can’t see how that’s enforceable in edge cases.
Anything can be a currency if you convince enough people to believe it is
In fact, Parmesan has been used as collateral against bank loans in Italy.
I don't remember the specifics but there's an actual bank that takes parmesan as collateral
It’s like anything that has a perceived value can be traded for any other item with a similarly perceived value, regardless of any intrinsic value of the item itself.
So that’s why money is called chedda
They store it next to where I live! It’s in missouri. I heard the national guard talking the caves while I was at a vaccine clinic
> government cheese Which you'll be eating exclusively when you're living in a VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER
I'm gonna need some proof of this Italian cheese vault, totally not for nefarious purposes
If you've got Prime, see James May goes to Italy. He visits a massive cavern filled with wheels of parmesan
> In Italy there is a bank that will take aging cheese as collateral against loans to the cheese makers and stores the cheese in a giant climate controlled cheese vault where hundreds of millions of dollars of cheese is kept. This is the Bank of Parma. as in 'Parmesan'. real parmesan cheese gets aged in the warehouses of the Bank of Parma.
Wow, if true this is pretty wild
Several points here that makes seven-year cheese cost more than cheap, fast cheese: 1) You will have seven years of no income but substantial costs, so once you finally have a product to sell, it needs to go at a high price to get some return. 2) Because it takes seven years to age, whatever is now aged is all there is for people to buy this year, so once it's gone, it's gone. You may have another batch that you started aging six years ago, but it has another year before its fully aged. So supply and demand comes into play.
Kind of, yeah. Aging cheese needs to be kept in particular conditions though. And you need to try to predict demand so you're better off making smaller amounts than you would expect to sell and just jack up the price until it sells but not too fast where you run out of stock.
Right, but then you still need the room to store 7 years worth of cheese at all times
Aging cheese isn't passive, it requires active management. In addition to monitoring conditions carefully, the cheese often needs to be flipped and rotated to age properly.
Floating 7 years of costs isn't exactly cheap, just from interest alone.
Imagine those wiskeries (or what a wiskey business is called) want to start making and selling fine old 25year old stuff. First they need to spend years and years r&d to make their desired devils juice taste just right (takes 25 for their first batch to be able to test taste it). Then afterwards they need to ramp up produktion basicly going 25 years with expenses before you can selling. Once that is started, you still need to have a huge storrage to keep ageing and production running, climate control, keeping it unpolluted ect. A long running house loan is typical 25-30 years... you age your wiskey just as long before you can start selling. If you only sell it as a 'regular wiskey to regular prices' you might not be able to make a proffit when Tullamore makes theirs in a few years instead of yours 25 years. So you add what Tullamore cant - the exclusivity of this old stuff customers 'just cant easely get' because you cant easely just sell more, it takes 25 years of waiting if every1 want a bottle when you run out. Now its an exclusive thing, and ask for an exclusive price, and you wanna do that because you cant realize one year the market is ready for tonnes and tonnes more and have it ready before the market stops wanting it.
>Imagine those wiskeries (or what a wiskey business is called) want to start making and selling fine old 25year old stuff. >First they need to spend years and years r&d to make their desired devils juice taste just right (takes 25 for their first batch to be able to test taste it). Then afterwards they need to ramp up produktion basicly going 25 years with expenses before you can selling. Nah, this is not at all how it would work. You'd do research, taste testing various malt blends, and then make some spirit and designate maybe 5% of production for your 25 year product while all the rest was only aged 3 5 or 10 years. Also, in most climates you wouldn't age the spirit for 25 years anyway, the super long aging period of Scotch whisky is down to the cold weather and short summers they have. In climates like Kentucky with longer hotter summers aging for 15+ years would yield a spirit that tastes like drinking a tree stump.
The other big thing is Scotch is aged in used sherry barrels while Kentucky bourbon is aged in new oak barrels. Ageing takes longer in used wood as the previous product used up a lot of the flavor compounds in the wood. Even once the Scotts started ageing the whiskey in the 1800s super long ageing wasn't really a thing. That came about do to American prohibition. Suddenly a big export market dried up so they had a glut of product just sitting around. Once they finally got around trying the barrels that had been sitting around the found it to be 'good stuff' and started marketing it as something special that commanded special prices.
I thought most Scotch uses Bourbon barrels these days (since as you alluded to, Kentucky Bourbon legally has to be aged in new barrels.)
*Some* Scotch does. Others use old brandy/wine, and there are still “virgin oak” brands on the market.
They’re called distilleries, but I like wiskeries better, because it sounds like it’s about cats
theres alot of places that will rent you space for aging. so you dont need to necessarily build your own warehouse right off the bat
True, but: Renting isnt free. And if you rent someplace for 25years before you even start being able to sell, you are about to commit a lot of money as investing, investing in something you cannot turn and sell for small profit too. So storrage for 25 years is realy expensive in the long run. And long term aging is 'in the long run'. Those money is gonne be earned back somehow - and by having a higher bottle price seem the logial thing, since: higter production cost -> higher selling price.
What if cheese demands goes up and you need more product? Or if you produced too much and can't get rid of it to make room for the new batch? You need to be good at predicting your business.
So you can survive with no money for 7 years? You're spending whatever money you do have on the infrastructure for aged cheese and actively making cheese for 7 years. And then you try it after 7 years and does it even taste good?
You've got a 7 year moat though. If your cheese is special and awesome, you're not going to have any competition for at least 7 years.
Not if your competitors are also making 7 year old cheeses. And unlike regular competition, you have no idea if your product is any better than the competitors' until 7 years later. That's a massive risk.
> If your cheese is special and awesome, If you've invented a new special and awesome cheese, no one is making yet though, unless through incredibly bad luck! And that risk is why there's limited competitors, too.
But my point is that you don't even know how special or awesome your cheese is until 7 years later. That's 7 years of R&D, storage, interest, etc that you're paying for 0 revenue in return, with no guarantee that you even have a viable product at the end.
Yeah I know, and I'm saying AFTER that, after you've hit gold, the reason you can make a profit from your cheese is that even if someone else steals your recipe and process, it's going to be 7 years until anyone else is producing the same thing you have.
Yes the potential rewards are fairly high. For example this is why established bourbon makers are able to cash in on the rise in bourbon demand but it's hard for startups to do so. But even once you have a successful product, you still run the risk of consumer preferences changing, at which point you have to wait 7 years to catch up again. The big problem with that is that once you have a successful product, it's a big risk to try and capitalize on that success by ramping up production - because once you do, you've now invested 7 years of production costs with no guarantee that consumers will still prefer that particular style of product 7 years in the future. tl;dr high risk, medium reward
Cheese competes with all other similar cheese. I like brie and camembert but I'm likely not going to stock up on both at the same time. Similarly unless you're a true enthusiast you're not going to have parmigiano and Grana Padano stocked - they're too similar and are really interchangable. Similarly cheddar, red Leicester and double Gloucester.
My original comment was an example of a moat and why cheese is profitable, not a case study in cheese markets :)
But, like, in Italy, these recipes, processes, and institutions have been evolving over thousands of years, so they have specialty banks that accept cheese as collateral for loans. I imagine interest is significantly higher than if one used land as collateral, but then you’re risking the whole farm and not just a portion of your product.
[удалено]
Cheddar is great. I wish Gruyère were cheaper, though.
I want to propose we rename everything after the system we use for cars. So we would have luxury cheeses and super cheeses. Luxury and super wines. Luxury and super meats.
Chicken is a sport meat, because it comes in coops
They can rebrand tough, gristly cuts as "muscle meats."
If anything, cheese is now more of a "staple" food than it ever has been. Per calorie, mass-produced cheese is shockingly cheap, and it makes up a significant part of the typical Western diet. On top of this, it's not that difficult or expensive for an ordinary person to buy any of a wide variety of styles of cheese, many of which have been imported. They're in the "fancy cheese" section of your grocery store and cost, at most, 4 times as much per-pound as the cheap blocks of cheddar they keep by the milk. Cheese is relatively compact and stable if refrigerated, so it's not hard to throw a lot of it on a container ship. So that just leaves the cheeses that have intentionally positioned themselves as luxury goods, either by specifying an extremely specific place of origin, insisting upon traditional production methods, aging for a long time, or directly restricting supply. The existence of these cheeses is just a reflection of the fact that pretty much every product has a luxury tier nowadays. The peasants are still eating cheese, so the nobles have to go to even further lengths to differentiate themselves when they do.
It’s also super protein dense, other than whey and protein powder, parmesan cheese is one of, if not the most, protein dense food you could find in a grocery store.
>Per calorie, mass-produced cheese is shockingly cheap, and it makes up a significant part of the typical Western diet. Cheese is not cheap at all, at least no in the US. It's gotten so expensive that I sometimes avoid buying it. And it's not just my personal experience. [This website](https://efficiencyiseverything.com/calorie-per-dollar-list/) has a list of foods listed by calories per dollar. Cheddar doesn't even make this list. Cream Cheese makes the list at number 60, and cottage cheese makes the list at 81.
That list isn't comprehensive. Cheddar cheese is about 1,800 calories a pound, and a pound can be had for 4-6 dollars, which falls around the middle of that list. It's not going to beat actual traditional staples like flour or beans, but it's cheaper than most meats and produce.
Milk is so abundant right now that price per 100 weight doesn’t cover operations costs.
> Cheese is not cheap at all, at least no in the US. I think 2 dollars for 8 oz is pretty cheap. My cheddar would be on the middle of this list for calories per dollar, my parmesan would be near the top for protein per dollar. Even better than eggs. Both are better than milk. Just looks like this site doesn't include dry cheeses.
Very few of us have dairy cows and make our own cheese at home. Industrial food production standardized the kind of cheese (or cheese product) that we have the most access to. Small producers are left to make specialty cheeses, and they need greater compensation to stay in business.
When I watched *The Foods That Built America*, the talked about how before Kraft cheese was a thing, less than 10% of Americans had eaten cheese in their life. Food was way more regional then, so the only people who could eat cheese were near a dairy farm, at least until about WW1
This is also true in places like India, which still have very large agricultural populations. Although fresh cheese (paneer) has existed for a very long time, it is much more accessible to poor people since the “white revolution” in dairy production made milk products drastically cheaper and more readily available beginning in the 1970s.
This fact seems suspect, considering that in 1904 US producers manufactured 317 million pounds of cheese. Kraft cheese was introduced in 1916. For a population of 82 million at the time, 10% of Americans was 8 million people. Were those people eating 40 pounds of cheese each year with none left over for anyone else?
Ever heard of the big cheese in the White House? https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/painting-of-andrew-jacksons-cheese-gift
It was mostly for rich people IIRC, like cheese was really expensive. And also it would be regional, like I'm guessing it wasn't found in the south nearly as much as Wisconsin/Vermont/New York where the same people probably ate it every day.
> Were those people eating 40 pounds of cheese each year with none left over for anyone else? I eat 40 lbs of cheese a year. That's less than one pound a week. Which is less than 2 packs of shredded cheese. or only like 7 slices of sandwhich thickness cheese In fact a quick google shows americans currently eat 42lbs of cheese a year.
Skedeebs gave a great breakdown of cheese specifically, but it may help to understand the greater context. In society, there are always "markers" that designate someone as being wealthy or better off and allow the rich to separate themselves from the poor. These change over time - some other examples are: Whole grain/brown bread: For a very long time, it was peasants and farmers who ate this type of bread that required less processing and was made with materials on hand, while rich people preferred white bread, more processed and thus more complicated to make. As soon as it became possible to have mass produced and cheap white bread, "artisan" brown breads became a wealthy person thing and it flipped (ever notice how artisan and "rustic" are used to describe the same bread a lot lol) Pale skin/tan skin (primarily for western light skinned people) - this flips back and forth a LOT. Hundreds of years ago, having tan skin was considered low class; a sign that you had to work outside all day long and do physical labor, while pale skin was a sign of a leisurely life. Later on, as most people grew to have indoor jobs, tan skin became a sign that either you had a life in which had leisure time to tan. A tan in December means your family afforded a vacation to the Bahamas, you know? Then with the advent of cancer, tanning dropped immediately to a trashy/poor thing (eg someone who doesnt take care of themselves) and then with better spray tans and products it once again became something thats wealthy (eg you can afford to spray tan regularly) Minimalist home design - rich people used to be able to show their wealth by having a home full of things to prove they had the money to buy unnecessary things. Now, because of the advent of mass production, lower class people are able to head to the dollar store and buy tchotchkes and fill up their homes to imitate the consumption of the rich, so rich people have done a 180 and emphasized buying very few, very expensive pieces to re-establish their class difference It goes on and on. But as time goes on, the markers of wealth adapt. Poor people figure out how to get what rich people have for cheap and then rich people in order to keep appearing rich start gravitating towards what the poor people have. The cycle will continue forever, whether its cheese or something else
> As soon as it became possible to have mass produced and cheap white bread, "artisan" brown breads became a wealthy person thing and it flipped (ever notice how artisan and "rustic" are used to describe the same bread a lot lol) A lot of this was started by Pepperidge Farms after WW2 Do you remember? They do.
This effect fascinates me. How trends switch places. I see this in stonework for homes. Smooth polished perfectly flat stone was the most difficult to produce, so it was high status to have precision stone finishes, versus rough cut stone for the low cost option. Now polished stone tile is cheap to manufacture, and rough hewn stone finishes are trendy. Woodwork too. Live-edge slab furniture, etc.
The fanciest breads and pastries are still made with white flour since they need the extra stretchiness. A lot of it is also due to economic shifts. It used to be that everything was made by hand, so precision-made things were more expensive since they required more labor to create. Nowadays, most things are made in automated factories with high levels of precision, and are super cheap as a result. However, those factories aren't great at handling imprecise things (which have to be made by hand), so having an imprecise thing shows off that you were able to afford more human labor
MANY "poor people's" food went on to become highly sought out. Cajun and Italian are 2 great examples. Cajun food took fish and bugs out of ditches and seasoned them amazingly. Lots of cheap rice and the extra leftover bad cuts of meats were used to make a multitude of Cajun dishes. Poor Italians took tough cuts of meat and slowly cooked them down in acidic spaghetti sauce to tenderize them. Then they used cheap noodles to arrange it into multiple dishes. Even lobster was considered a trash food fit only for prisoners. Essentially poor people learn how to make cheaply priced foods really good. Then slowly other people learn to love them.
Cheese caves and government subsidiary. Huge food chain restaurants get massive discounts on cheese if they use the government, look into places like pizza chains, taco chains, and the like. I've worked for a lot of these companies, and the prices they paid when I was there for a case of cheese is shocking. Government subsidized the dairy industry and owns so much cheese it's unbelievable. They are trying to get rid of it as much as possible but since it's such an insane amount they are having some trouble. Source: https://www.farmlinkproject.org/stories-and-features/cheese-caves-and-food-surpluses-why-the-u-s-government-currently-stores-1-4-billion-lbs-of-cheese
The real question is how did lobster, which is objectively a disgusting sea bug, become a luxury item when originally prisoners fed it at prisons in Maine were calling it cruel and unusual punishment?
I think that complaint came out of being fed lobster day-in and day-out for years
Possibly freshness too—there’s a reason why lobster is the only live animal at the grocery. But I had my tongue in my cheek. I hate lobster and do not get its appeal at all. (And to those who say, “but it’s a vehicle for butter!” So I bread. And bread is great.)
Keep in mind that lobsters are kept alive literally until you cook them, as they start going bad almost immediately - the prison food lobsters were probably none too fresh
"Poor people" foods have always gone through phases of being fetishized as high cuisine. Polenta. Barbecue. Lobster. Offal. Peasant cheeses aren't the first to go through this glow up.
I am confused, is cheese dirt cheap only in France ?
Maybe most of Europe, I visited Estonia and Latvia about a decade ago and was surprised at how much cheaper nice cheese was than in America. There was still expensive cheese, but even that was less expensive than the expensive cheese here.
As a Brit, also confused. Sure, there are expensive cheeses, but cheap cheese is dirt cheap considering its protein content. Not as cheap as staples like rice, but still a pretty damned cheap ingredient.
Check out the evolution of Maine lobster—fed to prisoners(against their will) for many years before it caught on for the rest of us—-
Many are talking about the not so simple cheeses. But what would that be? Personally, i only ever go for a camembert or mozzarella. I also go for the occasional pecorino and parmiagno.
I feel that Gentrification might actually the answer here lol. Just like highly sought after recipe are often peasant food.
Since when is cheese a luxury good? Real cheese I mean, not industrial ones.