As a child, I was a picky eater. Except when it came to cheese.
I eventually gained an appetite for other foods, but a decision to go vegetarian in my teens made cheese my focal point. It was my guilty pleasure, and one of my sole sources of animal fat and protein. Now, in my late 30s, the kind of cheese I eat today is drastically different from what I ate not even 10 years ago. And I’m far from alone.
Melted cheese—mozzarella on pizza, cheddar on macaroni, Monterey jack in quesadillas—is a prominent part of daily diets worldwide. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Americans eat an average of 30 pounds of cheese annually. Over a third of that comes from the mozzarella in pizza, while cheddar comes in as a close second. Yet in the past decade, both the domestic and global markets for cheese have begun to shift. Changing consumer concerns has led to more discriminatory tastes in cheese. America is experiencing a collective nostalgia for the cheeses of yesteryear—less processed, farmstead brands that hail from smaller-scale, pasture-based farms rather than the corporate behemoths of industrialized agriculture that currently dominate the market.
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