American Cheese Surplus Reaches Record High 398
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there's a 1.4 billion-pound cheese surplus. "The glut, which at 900,000 cubic yards is the largest in U.S. history, means that there is enough cheese sitting in cold storage to wrap around the U.S. Capitol," reports NPR. Americans managed to consume nearly 37 pounds per capita in 2017, but that wasn't enough to reduce the surplus. From the report: The stockpile started to build several years ago, in large part because the pace of milk production began to exceed the rates of consumption, says Andrew Novakovic, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. Over the past 10 years, milk production has increased by 13 percent because of high prices. But what dairy farmers failed to realize was that Americans are drinking less milk. According to data from the USDA, Americans drank just 149 pounds of milk per capita in 2017, down from 247 pounds in 1975.
Suppliers turn that extra milk into cheese because it is less perishable and stays fresh for longer periods. But Americans are turning their noses up at those processed cheese slices and string cheese -- varieties that are a main driver of the U.S. cheese market -- in favor of more refined options, Novakovic tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. Despite this shift, sales of mozzarella cheese, the single largest type of cheese produced and consumed in the U.S., remain strong, he says. Novakovic also notes that imported cheeses tend to cost more, so when people choose those, they buy less cheese overall. The growing surplus of American-made cheese and milk means that prices are declining. The current average price of whole milk is $15.12 per 100 pounds, which is much lower than the price required for dairy farmers to break even.
Suppliers turn that extra milk into cheese because it is less perishable and stays fresh for longer periods. But Americans are turning their noses up at those processed cheese slices and string cheese -- varieties that are a main driver of the U.S. cheese market -- in favor of more refined options, Novakovic tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. Despite this shift, sales of mozzarella cheese, the single largest type of cheese produced and consumed in the U.S., remain strong, he says. Novakovic also notes that imported cheeses tend to cost more, so when people choose those, they buy less cheese overall. The growing surplus of American-made cheese and milk means that prices are declining. The current average price of whole milk is $15.12 per 100 pounds, which is much lower than the price required for dairy farmers to break even.
wrap around the U.S. Capitol (Score:3)
"The glut, which at 900,000 cubic yards is the largest in U.S. history, means that there is enough cheese sitting in cold storage to wrap around the U.S. Capitol,"
Awesome! The artist Christo merely wrapped the German Parliament in cloth. Wrapping the US Capitol in cheese would absolutely top that!
Now, if we also have a surplus of bacon . . . we could also wrap it in that, and fry that bastard, and have lunch for the rest of the year!
Re:wrap around the U.S. Capitol (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, this sounds like a great idea. We can use it to build a wall around Washington, D.C. I'm pretty sure Mexico will gladly pay for it.
Re:wrap around the U.S. Capitol (Score:5, Insightful)
"The glut, which at 900,000 cubic yards is the largest in U.S. history, means that there is enough cheese sitting in cold storage to wrap around the U.S. Capitol,"
Awesome! The artist Christo merely wrapped the German Parliament in cloth. Wrapping the US Capitol in cheese would absolutely top that!
Now, if we also have a surplus of bacon . . . we could also wrap it in that, and fry that bastard, and have lunch for the rest of the year!
The beauty of this situation is that the pork is already on the inside.
Re:wrap around the U.S. Capitol (Score:5, Funny)
It's really a stupid measurement. The reference standard is how many times the cheese can wrap around the Library of Congress. Everybody knows that.
Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
If an industry consistently produces more than consumers demand and has prices below break even, the normal market response would be for some of the producers to go out of business. The only reason they don't is because of government subsidies. There's no good reason for the government to constantly exempt farmers from the normal law of supply and demand.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
If an industry consistently produces more than consumers demand and has prices below break even, the normal market response would be for some of the producers to go out of business. The only reason they don't is because of government subsidies. There's no good reason for the government to constantly exempt farmers from the normal law of supply and demand.
There is a very good reason why farmers are exempt from the normal laws of supply and demand... Same reason we use corn based ethanol that takes more energy to produce that the output energy as a fuel. That simple reason is... Iowa votes first
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
Most normal nations do all they can to keep their farms productive and producing so their nations will never face food shortages.
Some decades see a lot of extra food.
Productivity is good. Farmers on the land, been productive is good.
Needing to find money to import food is not good.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
Its hard work to ramp up and ramp down farms and the needed generational skills.
Most normal nations do all they can to keep their farms productive and producing so their nations will never face food shortages.
... and other countries have no subsidies at all. New Zealand has none. Do you think they are starving?
Subsidies are driven by politics, not by "preventing hunger".
The American Electoral College, which magnifies the power of small rural states, means that our system of subsidies is especially stupid. Even European farm subsides look sensible when compared with ours.
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European farm subsides keep out US products and services using terms like "chemicals" and "health".
Its very smart to keep a nation in food for decades.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:4, Insightful)
Noting that you get beef in the EU that originates outside the EU, you just don't get beef pumped full of hormones. Similarly you get chicken that is from outside the EU. It;s just not slaughtered in such disgustingly horrible conditions that the only way to make it safe to eat is wash it in chlorine.
The USA is free anytime to export these products to the EU, they just have to be produced in line with EU standards. It is a totally reasonable expectation.
It's no different from banning imports of toys painted with lead paint.
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It's no different from banning imports of toys painted with lead paint.
It's very, very different. Lead paint is demonstrably harmful, whereas the hysteria over "GMOs" and "teh kemikillzzz!" is just clever marketing.
By the sounds of that... You don't actually know what EU standards are. They aren't particularly high, Thailand can meet them, not sure why the US cant.
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Thailand meets them because they're not as large an economic threat in those areas. If Thailand started exporting massive amounts of food to the EU, you can bet something would come up making it unsafe.
Don't believe for a moment that countries don't game these systems for economic reasons. In all directions.
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You say these things now but your tune might change mighty fast in the event of regional weather disaster or some kind of blight that causes a large number of crops to fail. These things have happened in the past. Producing an over abundance of food means that we don't starve when this happens. You are correct the policy to not maximize economic efficiency because that is not what its about. Its about insurance.
It absolutely is about preventing hunger. It is also becoming a political foot ball, where on
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Most normal nations do all they can to keep their farms productive and producing so their nations will never face food shortages.
...
Needing to find money to import food is not good.
The world has changed. It used to be shipping food was expensive and wasteful. Shipping is now so cheap and reliable it is much less important to grow all your own food.
It used to be the case that farmers didn't produce enough food for everyone to eat well. We now produce enough food that everyone could eat a nutritious diet of more than 2,000 calories. So producing enough food is no longer the problem, it's moving food to the people who want it.
With these changes, it no longer makes sense for each country
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Re:Supply and demand (Score:4, Insightful)
That can change with politics, war, currency prices. An embargo.
When the low cost food stops, riots start.
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Its hard work to ramp up and ramp down farms and the needed generational skills.
A few decades ago, the US spent a buttload of money buying out something like 50% of all dairy farms because there was too much milk being produced and the prices were too low for the farmers to make a living.
Not too long after that, of course, the remaining dairy farmers started dosing their cows with rBST to gain a competitive advantage - and now we're back in the same situation.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
Keeping a stable food supply is one of the highest priorities of any sensible government on the planet, actually.
Problem is there are sometimes low demands for some things, which leads to issues that tend to spiral out of control if not managed properly.
This is one of those cases. It has been horribly mismanaged.
The shitty quality cheeses produced are also an issue.
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Some people like to act as though all of the farms would die without the subsidies, but that simply isn't true. It would be precisely those which are the least
Re:Supply and demand (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no good reason for the government to constantly exempt farmers from the normal law of supply and demand.
There's a very good national security reason:
We want to keep sufficient food production in the United States so that if we are at war, or just if there is a global food crisis, we won't have people starving to death.
That doesn't mean we necessarily have to fund milk producers, but it makes sense to ensure you have enough good food production. It's better than buying another stealth F-22 Raptor, and much cheaper.
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There's a very good national security reason:
That's a reason but I don't think it's a great reason any more. Farmers worldwide are so productive and shipping is so efficient that it's really unlikely we'll have a world-wide famine. Or any famine, for that matter. It's quite safe to just depend on remote farmers.
I won't even get into asking what sort of security spending that money elsewhere could buy.
It's better than buying another stealth F-22 Raptor, and much cheaper.
I don't know about that. A Raptor costs what, $100 million? That's a lot but an order of magnitude or two less than farm subsidies (measured in the tens
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That's a reason but I don't think it's a great reason any more. Farmers worldwide are so productive and shipping is so efficient that it's really unlikely we'll have a world-wide famine. Or any famine, for that matter. It's quite safe to just depend on remote farmers.
I really don't believe you at all.
There is indeed a good reason (Score:5, Informative)
There's no good reason for the government to constantly exempt farmers from the normal law of supply and demand.
There is a reason, and it's a damn good one: To regulate supply and stabilize pricing.
Think about it: have you ever had to worry about food, really, really worry about it? A moderate price increase due to increasing oil prices at the turn of the century is the closest our country has ever come to a "food crisis". There has never been a serious food shortage or price inflation for food in the US for as long as I've been alive.
It used to not be that way. You can go back to the 70s, and read about how rapidly fluctuating food prices [livinghistoryfarm.org] created quite a political stir, as evidenced by the April 1973 cover of Time Magazine [time.com]. If you study the data on this page [ourworldindata.org], you can see both how food prices (particularly beef) stabilized after 1980, and how the average worker has seen a steady increase over time in the amount of food that can be purchased with their wages.
That has been the primary purpose of the US Farm Bill: to encourage, subsidize, and regulate the food market, stabilizing pricing and providing ample food supply. Because when there's oversupply, people complain about food going to waste. When there's a lack of supply, people riot and governments collapse. Which would you really prefer?
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There's no good reason for the government to constantly exempt farmers from the normal law of supply and demand.
There is a reason, and it's a damn good one: To regulate supply and stabilize pricing.
Think about it: have you ever had to worry about food, really, really worry about it?
I entirely agree. There is no agricultural economy anywhere in the world that does not require government intervention to maintain a stable business environment. It is the nature of the beast. Industrial agriculture is vulnerable to the vagaries of nature, and have characteristics that no other economic activity possess - it is an essential primary producer, it is tied to seasonal cycles by nature with naturally fixed production cycles, it has large capital inputs that must be recouped on an annual basis, a
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Our President heard that cheese is essential for Poutine. And if his BFF Poutine wants cheese, well dammit, Poutine shall have cheese. Billions and billions of pounds of cheese. For Poutine.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:4, Funny)
I'm pretty sure Donald Trump's BFF cares a lot more about borscht than poutine.
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Woosh, wooshity woosh.
I will be glad to help (Score:5, Insightful)
I love cheese, fancy or not. But it's expensive. Quit hoarding, lower the price, and I'll eat it! Dairy product boom and bust is nothing new in the U.S. When I was a kid, dairy was like some kind of strategic item, with practically a command economy, government subsidies always coming and going. Our neighbor (farmer) got in and out of the dairy business every few years, following the subsidies. In fat (ha ha) years, the government was giving the stuff away.
Re:I will be glad to help (Score:5, Interesting)
I made a trip to the UK a few years ago and found quite a lot of really fucking good cheese of all kinds and varieties for very affordable prices. Over here, anything other than the fundamental basics for cheese are a small fortune. It seems to me our Dairy industry is pretty dysfunctional and I suspect government subsidies are discouraging them from innovating in the context of their surplus milk.
Re:I will be glad to help (Score:5, Informative)
That's why corn ethanol and high fructose corn syrup exist. Due to this system, the country grows more corn than it consumes. Consequently the government has to figure out things to do with the excess corn. It becomes foreign aid, feed for cattle, corn ethanol, and high fructose corn syrup. This is why those reports about beef costing us $x per pound in subsides doesn't really mean that we would save $x per pound if we ended the subsidies for cattle feed. The cost to grow that extra corn is a sunk cost [investopedia.com]. If we stopped using the excess corn for feed, that doesn't mean we get our money back. Its cost would just be distributed to other things we do with the excess corn - corn we send as foreign aid would cost us more, and ethanol and HFCS prices would go up. The way it's set up now, if farmers have a bad corn crop, all that happens is some cows go hungry instead of people going hungry (in fact those cows which can't be fed will probably be slaughtered to produce beef).
This is also why we we pay farmers not to grow anything - so their land is ready and available to be turned into cropland in case existing cropland should be decimated by disease, pestilence, or another dust bowl. If we didn't pay the farmers, they'd sell the land and it would be used to build condominiums and other things that you can't eat.
So the subsidies are basically insurance. We're paying extra to guarantee there's always an oversupply of food. We could kill the subsidies and the average price of food over time would be lower. But some years we wouldn't produce enough food to feed everyone and food prices would spike.
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The subsidies stem back to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone.
This is nonsense. The dust bowl affected mostly Oklahoma and Kansas, and did NOT lead to food shortages. The problem during the depression was OVER PRODUCTION and FALLING PRICES. And the purpose of the subsidies was an attempt to pull land out of production, and raise prices to fight deflation.
This was part of the NIRA [wikipedia.org], which was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1935.
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That's when Americans realized that OMG it's possible for the country not to produce enough food to feed everyone.
Really? People have experienced famines since the dawn of time. The last century or so has been the first time in human history that we grew enough food that famine isn't a realistic possibility any more.
Now that I think about it, I wonder when the last US famine was? I've heard asserted that we grow enough food now that there's no reason to expect any human to ever starve again unless there's some political cause for a food shortage. If that's so, and I find it plausible, that's an historic achievement.
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In fat (ha ha) years, the government was giving the stuff away.
I do not like green eggs and the gubment cheese... [youtube.com]
And? (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe if the cheese was of a better quality like you get elsewhere in the world it would sell better?
Also, cheese isn't the only thing to do with excess milk - butter and milk powder are globally traded commodities.
Do the Chinese buy up US-made infant formula like they do Australian and New Zealand formulas?
Also interesting to note that the article talked about consolidation of diary farms, but what it omitted is that on a global scale, the average US dairy farm is still what would be considered a hobby far
Part of the answer (Score:3)
Re:Part of the answer (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Part of the answer (Score:4, Informative)
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True mozzarella NOT what Americans call it... (Score:2, Offtopic)
True mozzarella is made from buffalo not cow's
ignorance is not an excuse
Mozzarella was granted Protected Designation of Origin status by the European Union in 1996
That's nice this isn't an EU issue (Score:3)
What's more the obvious solution is for our dairy industry to start making more expensive cheeses and carving into the imports.
Another Trump comment (Score:4, Informative)
Results (Score:4, Interesting)
It's simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, I can't even... (Score:3)
And you can largely thank our government for having a consistent food supply. The government heavily regulates what's grown and how it's grown via those subsidies. Before that we had over farming and farmers growing too much of the same, profitable crops until they market saturated and collapsed....
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Yeah, simple. Keep subsidizing it. (Score:2)
Your sig is rather on topic in this case, though rather wrong. (Celine's first law? She should stick to singing.) We have an ample food supply in the US and won't starve in the case of embargo or war. It is, in fact, national security. Quite frankly I'd rather 'waste' tax money to stabilize food prices and ensure US food production capacity over most other spending. Fortunately, the cost is not so great on the national scale of things - $20 billion dollars per year. Worth it.
Yes, I'd rather not put ethanol
Say CHEESE! (Score:2)
Time for a world record Fondue!
Cheese? (Score:3)
Re:Cheese? (Score:5, Interesting)
The label says "pasteurized process cheese food".
You're being too generous. IIRC, it's "pasteurized processed cheese food product". I don't know how a food is different from a food product and I'm pretty happy that way. I'll just stay away from the nasty stuff.
(Well, except I have a recipe for a Velveeta-based chili cheese dip. It's appalling but really tasty after a few beers.)
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I don't know how a food is different from a food product
I dunno? Maybe the food is cheese-like stuff in a packet and the food poduce is the awesome stuff you can spray out of a can.
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Could it be that the product isn't cheese?
Exactly. American "Cheese" is not cheese. Even in the US itself, it cannot be labelled as cheese, but must be called "processed cheese", "cheese-based food" or "edible congealed rubber-like product".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Time for more Govmint Cheese! (Score:2)
Government cheese! I've made a few omelets from it back in the 80s. The stuff was pretty decent. Do they still distribute it?
Excellent story about it at Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/31/643486297/episode-862-big-government-cheese
Then why (Score:3)
Then why is anything better than spray-cheese so bloody expensive?
Maybe you could feed that suplus milk to calves (Score:2)
"American Cheese" (Score:2)
TFS Didn't say cheese. It said "American Cheese". That's the problem. No one wants to eat American Cheese.
I've got some lovely French cheese in the fridge at home.
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You’re right about the summary, but what the (Vox) article really said is American [wikipedia.org] (along with “cheddar, Swiss and other cheese varieties on record”), which is much worse than just “cheese from the U.S.” Go ahead and check that Wikipedia article, and enjoy the mouth-watering pictures and description: “American cheese cannot be legally sold under the name (authentic) "cheese" in the US. Instead, federal laws mandate that it be labeled as "processed cheese" [...] or "cheese
SIMPLE SOLUTION (Score:2)
EXPORT IT (Score:2)
Living overseas, I cannot find American Cheese or a decent Cheddar ANYWHERE!
Send all that Land o Lakes American and Cabot Cheddar Cheese overseas! I need to show these locals how Americans get fat (and what good, stick-to-your-ribs mac-n-cheese is)!
I for one can't wait for the "more refined options (Score:3)
I for one can't wait for the "more refined options". There have been some good domestic cheeses appearing. There's no reason Wisconsin couldn't produce cheeses that are easily on par with the famous French varieties for half the price. I'm looking forward to $6/lb Wisconsin "Epoisses". :-)
Let's make this story into News For Nerds (Score:2)
Imagine how many gigabags of Doritos this much cheese could be made into!
You are what you eat (Score:2)
Cheese is a kind of meat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
burger sauce (Score:2)
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You tell me that a mornay sauce made with cheddar and beer doesn't beat that.
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MAGA (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly, we need to make America Grate again.
Just give it to hungry people (Score:2)
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The obsession with health foods (Score:2)
Re:Cow Milk (Score:5, Funny)
is for baby cows.
Moooo!
I love cheese! Just not a million pounds of it. No Whey...
Re:Cow Milk (Score:5, Funny)
is for baby cows.
Moooo!
I love cheese! Just not a million pounds of it. No Whey...
I Gouda hand it to you. Feta love of God, that's so funny, I Camembert it. Emmental for cheese jokes -- I just Edam up.
Re:Cow Milk (Score:4, Funny)
My blood is curdling, there's got to be a cheddar way of making cheesy jokes, just leave it brie. Some cultures are better left provolone.
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No, it was Mister Wensleydale.
Re:??? (Score:2)
You are exactly correct. This isn't a problem with capitalism, but government intervention.
The government is PAYING farmers to produce milk... Disrupting the natural supply and demand curbs.. Over 70% of producer's profits come from the government, so we are getting loads of extra production that cannot be used.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/dairy-subsidies-government-farm-programs-surplus-cheese/
Capitalism is doing that it does best and producing what it can sell, only in this case the go
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There's a reason why most countries regulate the dairy market.
What reason is that?
How come the countries that do NOT subsidize dairy have not seen the sky collapse?
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If it were totally 100% left up to the free market, the REAL situation we'd have with food supplies is that they'd wildly thrash back and forth between abundance and scarcity.
Most countries don't subsidize dairy, and many don't subsidize farms or food at all. Please provide some examples of the "thrashing" that occurs in these countries.
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Do you REALLY want to live in a world where food becomes genuinely seasonal and regional again, and you have to plan "what do I feel like eating tonight" around "what does the store actually have available to PURCHASE this week?"
Yes.
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If it were totally 100% left up to the free market, the REAL situation we'd have with food supplies is that they'd wildly thrash back and forth between abundance and scarcity.
No they won't. Any smart farmer or investor will see it happening once or twice and buy up farms that are going out of business. When supply falls far enough, they'll restart production and be the first to make a huge profit. If they're a food distributor, they'll be buying a lot of freezers to store food when it's cheap, selling it when it gets expensive.
This happens so often that people invented the entire futures market to deal with this problem before it even occurs.
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Coincidence I read about this last night (Score:2)
What I strange topic to come up now. Last night, I was wondering what exactly "American cheese" is. I looked it up on Wikipedia and from there I started reading on Wikipedia about the sizeable cheese stockpiles in various countries.
Odd that this would come up on Slashdot the next day.
Re:Coincidence I read about this last night (Score:5, Insightful)
Last night, I was wondering what exactly "American cheese" is.
It's this tasteless, rubbery gunk that, in some cases, looks pretty close to cheese.
It's really weird stuff, when I lived in the US I initially bought generic cheese (i.e. went for the most average product because their cheese looks weird and I wanted to go for the safest option), and it was tasteless rubbery gunk. So I bought stronger cheese, and it was tasteless rubbery gunk. Then I bought extra strong, mature, whatever cheese, and it was still tasteless rubbery gunk. A few months later I was on a plane stuck on the tarmac due to snow and chatting to the guy next to me, who was a cheese importer. He said business was tough, because it was hard to sell cheese with any flavour when most people went for the most bland gunk there was. So there were twenty different types of cheese in the supermarket, but all were the same bland gunk, because that's what sold.
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You were going to a crap supermarket then. There are plenty of world-class cheeses made in the US. They might represent a small share of the overall market, so I understand the frustration of your cheese-importing friend, but they exist.
Re:Coincidence I read about this last night (Score:5, Informative)
There's something worse: American "chocolate". I first thought the sample I tried is badly spoiled -- it tasted like vomit. Turns out, US manufacturers intentionally add butyric acid (which is a good part of what makes vomit smell) because it was what "consumers demand".
Early on, chocolate production in the US was done with exceptionally bad hygiene and poor process, resulting in a product that was spoiled and in any civilised setting would be thrown out. Yet like that cheese gunk, companies instead make people think this is what chocolate tastes like.
Being able to legally call a product with no cocoa at all "chocolate" doesn't help, either.
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American Cheese is a style of cheese. It is mostly made from vegetable oil; it isn't really real cheese. They're allowed to call it 100% cheese if they have some minimum percentage of milk.
There is no style of product called American Chocolate. American chocolate is just chocolate made in America.
Anybody who bakes with chocolate buys "baking chocolate," which is 100% pure chocolate. It tastes different depending on the grade of cacao used, but not based on where it is made. And if you use this and eat it fr
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The most insane experience I had there was when I bought small mozzarella balls to use as appetizer. Placed in the middle of a dinner table, after a few m
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A lot of American Cheese Products, such as cheese wizz and those orange slices aren't made from cheese curds. Instead they are made from the whey, there are special powdering towers used to remove the water resulting in a whey powder that is used to make all that crap. It's actually kind of a genius solution to reduce waste from traditional cheese making, and produce more profit in the mean time. That said I don't like it much either.
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OTOH, it took Russia from a peasant society to a space fairing society in 50 years. If they hadn't been so rigid and moved to a mixed economy, they still might be doing well. Of course, the other problems they had like corruption and complacent government probably would have got them.
It's one of the big advantages of democracy, rotating governments before they get too complacent and corrupt, which will kill any system.
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Please, Wright Brothers to Moon Landing was only 66 years. The whole world moves fast now.
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In 1900 America was much more advanced then Russia, which still had an aristocracy that traded in peasants and a big secret police bureaucracy. America also didn't sacrifice a large chunk of its population and industrial base to win WWII or have people like Stalin in charge to set things back.
Another example is China, who once they did switch to a more mixed system advanced pretty quick. When I was a kid, it was "eat your dinner, there's millions of starving Chinese". They were also smart enough to switch g
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I'd buy yogurt daily
Get a yogurt maker, such as this one [amazon.com] (which also makes great soup). Then you can make your own yogurt for the price of whole milk, and eat it fresh.
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Yoghurt is cheaper than milk for me ... I don't really see the point.
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Yoghurt is cheaper than milk for me ... I don't really see the point.
Where is that?
Why would anyone make milk into yogurt if the yogurt is cheaper?
Where I am, milk is $3 per gallon. Yogurt is $0.60 per cup, or nearly $10 per gallon.
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Netherlands. 1L organic milk is 1.12 Euro at my nearest supermarket, organic yoghurt is 98 cents. Difference hold for non organic.
I assume it is because they have less risk on yoghurt sales due to longer shelf life and lots of competition.
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It's just a buffer/capacitor for food supply and food prices.
Re:The cheesiest (Score:4, Funny)