28 Interesting Facts About Cheese

Here are 28 Cheese facts.

1-5 Cheese Facts

1. Cheddar Cheese is never naturally orange. – Source

2. Italy’s Credem Bank takes Parmesan cheese from local producers in exchange for cheap loans (charging 3-5% interest, depending on quality) & a fee ensuring the cheese matures properly (2 yrs) in the bank vault (cheese is sold if the loan defaults). Around 430,000 parmesan wheels ($200M+) are stored there. – Source

3. The most stolen food item in the world is cheese, with 4% of all cheese being sold end up stolen. – Source

4. President Andrew Jackson once had a block of cheddar cheese delivered to the white house that was four feet in diameter and two feet thick, weighed nearly 1400 pounds. He invited 10,000 visitors to the White House to eat it and it was gone within two hours. – Source

5. When cheese is digested, it breaks down into an opioid. Other opioids you may know about are heroin and morphine. – Source

6-10 Cheese Facts

6. The “holes” in Swiss cheese were, until recently, seen as a sign of imperfection and something cheese makers tried to avoid. – Source

7. Albertville, France’s electricity is powered by Beaufort cheese. Since whey is unnecessary to make Beaufort cheese, bacteria is added to the whey. This transforms the whey into biogas. This gas is then fed through an engine which heats water to 90°C (194°F) to generate 2800 MWh/yr of electricity. – Source

8. There’s a cheese from Sardinia with maggots in it that’s outlawed by European Union food hygiene-health regulations, however, it’s still made and sold on the black market. – Source

9. People started dying cheese orange back in the 17th century to fool people into thinking it was higher quality. – Source

10. Stilton blue cheese is known to frequently cause odd, vivid dreams. – Source

11-15 Cheese Facts

11. American Cheese cannot be legally sold as “cheese” in the United States. It must instead be labeled as “cheese product,” “cheese food,” or “American Singles,” since its manufacturing process varies so significantly from that of other cheeses. – Source

12. Philadelphia cream cheese is named after a village in upstate New York, not the famous Pennsylvania city. – Source

13. Scientists have successfully created cheese using human bacteria collected from toes and belly buttons. – Source

14. In the 2013 American Cheese Competition, only one cheese was entered in the Dry Jack category, it came in third. The judges chose to not award first or second. – Source

15. Cheese can be addictive, as it contains trace amounts of naturally occurring morphine, that comes from the cow’s liver. – Source

Also see: Top 10 Stinkiest Cheeses in the World

16-20 Cheese Facts

16. The crunchy bits you sometimes get inside of aged cheese are amino acid crystals. – Source

17. Gouda accounts for over half of the world’s cheese consumption. – Source

18. The French have a different cheese for every day of the year. Cheese experts estimate the total number of different French cheeses is around 1000. – Source

19. The oldest known cheese was from 1615 BC in China and resembles cottage cheese. – Source

20. Västerbottensost, a prized cheese from Sweden, can only be made in one village (Burträsk). After forensic DNA tests, multiple scientific studies and several documentaries, nobody knows why. – Source

21-25 Cheese Facts

21. Wisconsin produces around 2.6 billion pounds of Cheese each year. – Source

22. Kraft Singles cannot be called cheese because less than 51% of it is actually cheese. – Source

23. The cheese was discovered by accident by ancients carrying milk in the stomach linings of animals. – Source

24. Moose cheese costs around $420 per pound, since each milking takes two hours, and must be done in complete silence. – Source

25. Pule cheese is the world’s most expensive cheese and it comes from the milk of Balkan donkeys from Serbia. It’s valued at $600 per pound; it’s so expensive because there are only ~100 jennies (female donkeys) that are milked for pule-making. It takes 3 gallons of milk to create 1 pound of cheese. – Source

26-28 Cheese Facts

26. Edam Cheese never goes bad, it only hardens. This resulted in its popularity at sea and in remote places. – Source

27. For thousands of years, the cheese was made with an enzyme found in the inner wall of the fourth stomach of baby calves, which required killing the calf before it was weaned. Today, 80%-90% of cheese in the US and Britain is made with an enzyme created in a genetically modified microorganism. – Source

28. Sales of Wensleydale cheese strongly improved because of Wallace and Gromit, saving the cheese. – Source