Kraft was a Mennonite who grew up almost literally on the US border (Niagara Falls area). He moved to Buffalo to work for a cheese company in his mid 20s. That cheese company basically fired him (dissolved the company) while he was on a business trip in Chicago. So he started delivering cheese there, but soon opened his own cheese factory nearby, with the intent to produce cheese that could be shipped and stored for long periods.
He lived the rest of his life in the US, selling the cheese to eager buyers in the US (and also in Canada). During the WW2, he got a government contract to supply said cheese, and things really expanded from there.
Kraft American cheese is regular old American cheese, albeit made with cheaper cheddar. It’s emulsified into skim milk instead of water, which is interesting.
If you read the article/definition of cheese, it's just that the additives make up more than 5% which means it can't be legally classified as cheese, but the point of that law is that businesses were using mostly filler and selling it as cheese. This is to protect consumers by informing them of ingredients, not to define what cheese is. 94% of a kraft is still pure cheese by every definition. Like if you made a cheese dip and put enough peppers in it that it was 5.1% peppers, you couldn't sell it as cheese even though everyone knows it's cheese and peppers. The law isn't defining what is and isn't cheese it's defining how much of what you're buying is cheese. A kraft single by every other definition of cheese is still cheese.
Kraft still uses essentially what is American Cheese, they merely label it in such a way that makes it clear it is a processed cheese product.
The thing you're thinking of would be things labelled Pasteurized DAIRY product rather than Pasteurized CHEESE product. The former is the stuff that isn't and doesn't really contain cheese. The latter is decidedly just blended, emulsified cheese.
also I think her facts may just possibly be wrong. 90 lbs of cheese, on avg, per person, per day. She just pulled that one out of her ass. practically no one can eat 90 lbs of just straight cheese, especially not everyone, every day.
I love how everyone is in these comments like "I suspect this claim of eating 90lbs of cheese per day is somewhat exaggerated for the average American"
Pretty sure its cheddar in the picture tho, its whole blocks not slices, and a few of the sides have that look from when you split a block of cheddar because of how it crumbles.
There is also a difference between American Cheese which is not cheese and cheese made in America which seems to get intentionally called American cheese.
American cheese contains cheese and can absolutely be a cheese. It's real cheese mixed with an emulsifier and sometimes filler. A decent American cheese is just something like a normal cheddar with some emulsifying salt thrown in so it melts differently.
You can get the really cheap stuff like Kraft singles that have a lot of fillers, but they're not even considered American cheese.
And a small amount of emulsifiers at that. Doesn’t take much. And emulsifiers arent even inherently bad; garlic, eggs, etc. all contain a lot of natural emulsifiers. I can see hating on kraft singles but a good deli American cheese is certainly cheese, let alone plain old cheddar which is what is pictured here.
People mistakenly think American cheese isn't real cheese because they think all American cheese is like Kraft slices. Regular American cheese is just basically a type of mild cheddar and Colby that are blended with an emulsifier so that it melts easier. This is a joke about French people believing it
They've also never heard of the Wisconsin cheese industry. Every cheesemaker in Wisconsin has to go through a state-regulated apprenticeship program which France doesn't even require.
That's cute! France has 47 AOP cheeses where the milk, geography, production and aging are legally tied to specific millenia old traditions and terroirs
...where exactly do you think American cheese making knowledge came from? "Millenia old traditions" yes, and some of people carried those traditions to America 300 years ago. It's just that here, unlike France, we understand that sometimes you can actually change things without the whole world ending lmao
I'm not going to talk about training. But... In the world cheese championships, Wisconsin dominates medal count consistently, recently taking home over a third of the medals for cow cheeses. They did not win grand champions though.
Here's the moral of the story though... We don't need to fight. Wisconsin has a ton of world class cheese (more than anyone else), but that doesn't mean they're the best. Both sides need to respect that the other is doing good shit.
I wish more people thought like this, why did this comment thread turn into a cheese war between France and Wisconsin? Can’t we all just enjoy the goodness that is cheese lol
Even craft singles aren't anything close to the nightmare chemistry experiments people make them out to be.
Theyre made of cheddar cheese an emulsifier
And secret scary third thing that gets it relabeled by the fda from cheese to "cheese product" as well as a couple preservatives.
The secret scary third thing is literally just whey. They add it during the mixing of the cheese and the emulsifier and the fda says that the ratio of cheese to "additives" (again the additive in question here is just whey) isn't high enough to label it cheese
and the 2 preservatives are not the scary ones. Lactic acid which is naturally found in relatively high amounts in most fermented dairy products to start with and sorbic acid. The far and away most commonly used preservative in the world which is in almost all of the real cheeses as well and is in everything from artisan bread to high end wine
If I take something and adds stuff to it, it's not the same thing anymore, right? How much whey can you add before it's not cheese anymore? At some point it's going to be homeopathic cheese.
No bro you dont understand. When i make bread by combining flour and water and a bit of salt its just bread right? When i then add in some high fructose corn syrup - found in relatively high amounts in most corn products, and a bit of sorbic acid they're telling me it isnt bread any more?
Don't ever underestimate a Europeans need to think they are superior when it comes to food. They have a boner for that kind of thing. Apparently the only food you can get in the US is corn syrup and McDonalds.
Well, the important point here are the emulsifiers or emulsifying salts, mostly calcium phosphate and sodium phosphate. After adding these, the cheese would not longer be allowed to be sold as "cheese" after EU law or the law of other countries like Switzerland.
These emulsifiers are also what makes the cheese unhealthy. The consumption of emulsifying salts is generally considered safe. However, excessive consumption is discouraged, as it can contribute to high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, osteoporosis, kidney strain, and intestinal damage.
Typically sodium citriare. Which I highly recommend buying or making if you want to make home made quesos. It's so delicious, and feels so funny when you Americanize a snobish real cheese. Gooda? Not anymore! 🤣
American cheese is the GOAT when you need the cheese to melt smoothly. It’s the secret ingredient in my chili con queso, it helps the other cheeses melt without breaking if you put a slice in a grilled cheese, and it’s one of life’s simple pleasures on a cheeseburger off your backyard grill. It’s not really that good right off the block the way most other cheeses are, but if you’re melting there’s nothing better.
Might be true, but my 41kg of cheese a day would look a lot more diverse than this pile. Even though I can eat 1kg of the same cheese and still want more of it. After some time I need some diversity, and that pile looks just bland and boring.
I'm not excited looking at it, while I am always excited to look at chees shops and marked stalls where they have so much diffrent and culurfule chees. Those shops and stalls actually make me want to eat every cheese they have on offer. That pile is just offputting, because of how boring it looks.
Peter here. The first joke is exaggerating how much cheese Americans eat. The reply is a French guy joking that processed American cheese doesn’t qualify as real cheese to him. Peter out.
The French don't generalize to all American cheese. He said that the cheese in this picture doesn't qualify as cheese. This is because it looks way too industrial. Pourquoi y a pas de croute, bordel!
American cheese isn't a generalization, its a specific type of processed cheese, although the specific cheese blend can vary, as does the quality. Honestly tho the picture just looks like plain old cheddar to me
Wait, what? Fake french person?
How dare you!?
I have you know, Jean-Luc Fromage is a very common name, just like Hans Wurst in Germany or John Ham in english speaking countries.
The "Average American eats 90 pounds of cheese a day" factoid is false. The Average American eats 0.11 pounds of cheese per day. Kraft Slice Georg who eats 90k ibs of cheese per day is an outlier and should not be counted
For some reason people act like the lowest quality food Americans have are actually the highest quality that you can get in America. The same happened with sliced bread. Even though there are thousands of bakeries in the US, everyone looks at the ultra processed wonder bread and acts like that’s all Americans eat.
I'm not upset at the assertion that 90 lbs a day is average for an American.
I'm not upset at saying American cheese isn't real cheese.
Hell, I don't even mind someone claiming to be from the pretend land of "France."
I am, however, upset that nobody seems to be pointing out that that is nowhere near 90 lbs of cheese in that picture. As an American, I assure you that that isn't even close to my daily intake of cheese.
See, everyone throwing a fit that it says “day” doesn’t realize we don’t all eat that. It’s just one person skewing the average for the whole country, and this is them.
I think the whole thing is a joke, the stereotyped french guy with the beret and mustache and the name that translates to cheese from the french, the fact that americans dont eat 90 pounds of cheese a day, the fact that these dont even look like american cheese, they look like colby, cheddar, mozz, and monterey maybe
The joke is the amount of big brained Redditors discussing how you cant eat 90lbs of something in a day, like there are people who accepted that as the truth.
This is actually a clever way you can lie with statistics.
There is a cheese-eating abomination which lives inside of a mountain in Nevada. Technically we gave it citizenship in '69 to enable some legal loopholes. It demands 30 Billion pounds of cheese per year as tribute, or else it will open a rift to its home dimension.
So TECHNICALLY this is the average, but the distribution is very skewed
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u/qualityvote2 16h ago edited 6h ago
u/Apprehensive_Sky4558, your post does belong here!