Authors: Michael Moss
The nutritional math, when it comes to cheese, is staggering too. 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. Those 33 pounds also have has many as 3,100 grams of saturated fat, or more than half a year’s recommended maximum intake. Cheese has become the single largest source of saturated fat in the American diet, though it is hardly the only culprit.
Day in and day out, Americans on average are exceeding the recommended maximum of fat by more than 50 percent.
The soaring amounts of cheese we eat is no accident. 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. 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. 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.
By itself, however, the industrialization of cheese does not explain the surge in consumption. To triple America’s intake in forty years, the food industry has also worked vigorously to change the way cheese is eaten. It is no longer a rare treat to be savored with guests, before a meal. In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an
ingredient
, something we add to other food. And not just any ingredient, either. Cheese is now being slipped into packaged foods that are found in almost every aisle of the grocery store, from the frozen pizzas that now boast “triple cheese,” to peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers, to packaged dinner entrees that tout their contents with names like “extreme cheese explosion,” to the breakfast sandwiches stocked in the meat cooler. Moreover, to boost the usage at home, the dairy aisle has been loaded with cheese made more and more convenient for use in recipes. Where there used to be a few blocks of cheddar and Swiss and some packs of sliced cheese on the shelf, there are now vast hanging displays of cheese—shredded cheese, cubed cheese, blended cheese, string cheese, crumbled cheese, spreadable cheese, bagged cheese, cheese mixed with cream cheese.
This deployment of cheese as a food additive has proven to be a windfall for food companies, driving up sales of cheese as well as the products that now use it to increase their allure. As a result, Kraft has become not only the largest cheese maker, it has climbed to the top of all food manufacturing. For consumers, however, the results may be far less thrilling. Cheese as an additive, with all of its undeniable bliss, has equally big implications for overeating.
T
he first step in the industrialization of cheese came in 1912 when a thirty-eight-year-old Chicago street peddler named James Lewis Kraft
found his calling. He had been selling traditional cheddar to grocers from a horse-drawn cart, rising before dawn each day to get his cheese from the South Water Street market downtown, the pricey, high-quality stuff his customers valued. Sales were strong, but there was one problem: constant
spoilage, which ate into his profits.
“Made up loss-and-gain account for December,” he wrote in his diary. “Found loss of seventeen cents. Worse than I expected.”
Some grocers wouldn’t buy his cheese at all in the summer, because it wilted in the heat. Others grumbled about how much was getting wasted each time they sliced off a wedge for a customer and a hard crust formed on the exposed surface. Kraft lost no time in trying to salvage his livelihood. He had no formal training in food chemistry. His first job, after leaving the family’s farm in Ontario, had been clerking in a grocery store. Undeterred, he started tinkering at night in the boarding house where he lived. He ground up several kinds of cheddar, and cooked them in a copper kettle, ending up with a glop of stringy, greasy goo. The heat separated the oil and protein molecules, leaving Kraft with an unsightly mess.
The experimentation went on more or less for three years until, one day in 1915, Kraft stumbled upon a solution. He was stirring a pot of cheese continuously as it melted, for fifteen minutes. When he looked down at the pot, he saw that the fat hadn’t bled out. The agitation from the continual stirring had kept the fats and proteins together. Now smooth and homogenized, the mixture poured easily into containers, where it solidified again. He rounded up some 3½- and 7½-ounce cans, sterilized them, filled them with the cheese, and embossed the label with his name, “Kraft Cheese,” and a promise that would soon get the whole country excited: This was a “cheese of creamy richness” that “will keep in any climate.” Before long, he ditched the horse and cart. He needed trucks to fill all the grocery store orders for his cheese-in-a-can.
Traditional cheese makers were appalled. They tried to get lawmakers to force Kraft to label his canned cheese with any number of
caustic descriptors, including
embalmed, imitation, made-over
, and
renovated
. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the manufacture of cheese and other dairy products, finally settled on a variety of more palatable terms like “American cheese food” and “American cheese product.” But the name that stuck came from Kraft’s own patent, in which he described his invention as a “process of sterilizing cheese and an improved
product produced by such process.” Henceforth, the broad category of cheese that is industrially improved became known as “processed cheese.”
Notwithstanding the critics, Kraft’s cheese turned out to be a perfect field ration for soldiers. He sold six million pounds to the federal government in World War I, and the idea of cheese that could sit around for months on end without needing refrigeration gradually caught on with grocers, too. Given the demands of the job, Kraft was soon joined in business by his four brothers, and by 1923 they had turned their company into the largest cheese manufacturer in the world, adding factories and an endless stream of new technology that sped up the fabrication while lowering production costs.
One of its most popular brands was Velveeta, which Kraft didn’t invent but acquired from another entrepreneur in 1928. Velveeta was made directly from milk, milk fat, and the whey that dairies previously discarded. The stirring that Kraft had done in his copper kettle was
replaced by sodium phosphate, a chemical additive, which acts as an emulsifier and prevents the fat from separating from the protein in milk. It also more than doubled the sodium content of processed cheese, and it siphoned away—via the chemicals—much of the cheese flavor, which is why processed cheese tastes so mild.
Over the ensuing decades, the technicians at Kraft pulled off one miracle after another in making the fabrication of processed cheese faster and cheaper. In the 1940s, James Kraft’s brother Norman invented a contraption called the chill roller on which hot, melted processed cheese was rapidly cooled so that it could be cut into thin slices. By the 1960s, those slices were getting individually wrapped in plastic for minimum mess and maximum convenience. In the 1970s, enzymes were being used in larger amounts to shorten the aging and flavoring process, which spurred a 70 percent jump in production that decade.
But the crowning achievement came in 1985, when Kraft opened two factories in Minnesota and Arkansas that used cutting-edge technology to speed up the process like never before. Kraft still produced huge amounts of natural cheese (cheddar, Swiss, mozzarella), which required as many as
eighteen months or more, start to finish, to reach ripeness. But for years, company officials had been dreaming of a better, less costly way, even creating a “SWAT team” of technologists and presenting them with a challenge:
“Forget about the way cheese is made today. Look at the problem with fresh eyes.”
Nearly a decade had passed, but with the two new factories up and running, the revolution could begin. In one single continuous process, fresh milk would enter one side of the plants and come out the other end as cheese. In between, the milk was put through a rigorous straining called ultrafiltration, enzymes were added at various stages and agitators worked with the chemical emulsifiers to keep the fat molecules blended in. Where traditional cheese took a year and a half or more to prepare and age, the new process whittled that time down to mere days. This final innovation got a name to match its grandeur:
“Milk in, cheese out,” as they said at Kraft.
W
ith the making of cheese taken to warp speed, all that was left was getting people to eat more of it, and this was no easy feat. It would require the combined efforts of the dairy industry, the federal government, and Kraft all pulling together to overcome a major hurdle: The people were not so inclined.
By 1985, in fact, much of the country was trying to
avoid
high-fat dairy products, especially milk. Women and girls had led the way. In a long, slow—and, for the dairy industry, painful—shift that started in the 1950s, they had come to see milk as an easy and obvious sacrifice in watching their weight. A 12-ounce glass has 225 calories. Starting in the 1960s, the fat in milk was linked to heart disease as well. The same glass has 7.5 grams of saturated fat, or about half of a day’s recommended maximum. (Milk is also surprisingly flush with sugar; 12 ounces has four teaspoons of sugar from the lactose in the milk.) By 1988, for the first time ever, grocery stores were selling more lower-fat milk than whole milk.
This effort by Americans to cut back on fat thrust the dairy industry into crisis. It was suddenly drowning in surplus whole milk, as well as the fat that was being taken out of whole milk to make the skim. This extracted fat is called milkfat, and it was piling up due to a simple fact of nature: Cows can’t make skim milk. They can make only full-fat milk, so milkfat became something that had to be removed and then stored somewhere. The dairy industry’s problem, however, was not just the cow’s mammary system. The cows that the industry increasingly came to own were no longer ordinary cows turning out modest sums of milk. They were milk machines.
In the old days, dairy cows idled in pastures, just a few to a farm and tended by milkmaids, and they were mainly located in Wisconsin, where the cows had to expend a good deal of their energy just to stay warm. By the 1980s, however, the center for dairy was shifting to California, where balmy weather was only the start of big things to come for the milk cow. The typical dairy operation came to have herds of 500 to 2,000 cows, genetically bred through artificial insemination. They were moved into gigantic sheds where artificial lighting extended their workday. This industrialization, along with a heartier diet of corn and added fats, transformed the American dairy cow into a prodigious producer. Where each animal used to give barely a gallon and a half of milk a day, the modern cow puts out more than six gallons each. Six gallons of full-fat milk.
If people were cutting back on milk, one might ask, why didn’t the dairies cut back on their production, rather than send it soaring to new heights? The answer is that they didn’t have to cut back. Milk is one of the most stunning examples of overproduction in the American food supply system, with huge consequences on obesity, but a bit of explanation is required to appreciate the industry’s full illogical splendor.
Dairies are no ordinary companies. They are not beholden to the constraints of a free market economy. Since the 1930s, the federal government has viewed milk as vital to the nation’s health, and thus, it has labored to ensure that dairies never go under. It subsidized the industry by setting price supports and used taxpayer money to buy any and all surplus dairy products. As a result, the dairies didn’t have to bother with the normal
commercial concerns in selling food. They didn’t have to mess with supersizing or target heavy users or concern themselves with any of the other marketing tactics deployed by food manufacturers to boost consumption. The government simply bought as much as the dairies could make.
It wasn’t just milk that the government subsidized, either. It protected the milkfat as well, since the dairy industry couldn’t be expected to just toss the fat away and remain financially healthy. This had a consequence. With the cows making more milk than anyone wanted to drink and the milk that people did want to drink being stripped of its fat, the industry devised an ingenious solution: It started turning all that unwanted milk and extracted milkfat into something else. It started turning it into cheese, which soaks up milk and milkfat like a sponge. (One pound of cheese takes a gallon of milk off the dairy industry’s hands.) Production began to surge, and just like the excess milk, the dairies didn’t have to worry too much about selling the cheese. Whatever the grocers didn’t buy, the government did, citing its responsibility to subsidize the dairy industry.
These government purchases hummed along rather quietly until 1981, when the dairies got greedy. By that point, there were so many operators sending so much excess milk and milkfat to cheese makers that the government was buying more cheese than it could ever give away. This cheese, along with surplus butter and dried milk, accumulated into a stack that weighed 1.9 billion pounds, and it cost taxpayers $4 billion a year. With more truckloads arriving daily, this milkfat mountain was growing faster than the national debt. The storage fees alone were running upwards of $1 million a day. It grew so large, in fact, that the government began secreting it away in caverns and a vast, abandoned limestone mine near Kansas City, where
The Washington Post
’s agriculture reporter described an astonishing scene:
“Deep beneath the ground here, in more bags, barrels and boxes than the mind can imagine, the awesome triumphs of the prodigious American milk cow rest enshrined in dark, cool and costly comfort. What they’re keeping here is government-owned milk, butter and cheese. It keeps piling up, costing the treasury millions upon millions of dollars, and nobody knows what to do with it.”
Enter the Reagan administration and its commitment to slash the federal budget. In looking around for programs to cut, the new secretary of agriculture, John Block,
discovered the cheese vaults and set out to put a stop to the government’s buying of surplus, not to mention its storage fees. This required some astute wrangling on his part, since the mega-dairies wielded considerable political clout. At one point, Block felt compelled to perform a little show and tell. He requisitioned hunks of stored cheese that had grown moldy, and showed these to members of Congress who needed some extra convincing. Block’s stunt rankled some people, since so much of the stored cheese was, in fact, of the processed variety, which was designed to withstand being locked away.
“Some of us were aggravated that this guy would hold up moldy cheese,” the executive vice president of the Kansas City storage facility said at the time. “Processed cheese will keep for five years under proper conditions.”