Wednesday, April 13, 2011

the color of cheese

I had two questions for my loyal readers while I was driving into work this morning, but now I can only remember one.  I hope for your sake I remember the other.

I've been a big cheese eater my whole life, and my lunch of choice as a kid used to be American cheese sandwiches.  Sometimes on the weekend, my dad would fancy it up and grill them.  I know, we really broke new ground there.  When I was very young, I remember the slices of American cheese were always yellow and then at some point my dad started coming home with white American cheese.  He always ordered the cheese from the same deli, and I remember being uncertain by this new color of the cheese and I didn't eat it for awhile. 

However, nowadays, all you can get is white American cheese.  Sure, they sell yellow Kraft singles, but I always thought those were highly weird and I'm not convinced that's real cheese.  My question is, why did the cheese change color?  Was it an anti-chemical thing?  Can you in fact still buy 1/2 pound of yellow American cheese?  Maybe I just haven't been paying attention at the deli counter.

Posted by Meghan W-T at 10:52 AM
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8 comments:

  1. leithApril 13, 2011 at 11:44 AM

    This article is very interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cheese

    The penultimate paragraph somewhat answers your question, but the article as a whole reinforces my dislike for american "cheese"

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  2. Meghan W-TApril 13, 2011 at 12:07 PM

    So it's a chemical thing. I don't understand that. Why did they start making it yellow in the first place? Did you eat American Cheese in Australia? What color was it?

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  3. UnknownApril 13, 2011 at 4:03 PM

    My mother still buys yellow american cheese...I think she has a hated for white american cheese, though she is from Maine, which is basically Canada, so you cannot trust her.

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  4. carolynApril 13, 2011 at 4:33 PM

    you know that grilled cheese is great with ketchup!

    ReplyDelete
  5. leithApril 13, 2011 at 4:58 PM

    We don't have american cheese in Australia. I haven't seen it anywhere outside the states, but I'm guessing it is probably available in Canada.

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  6. Meghan W-TApril 13, 2011 at 5:02 PM

    USA! USA! USA!

    Carolyn, you're love affair with ketchup is a bit odd.

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  7. LibbyApril 15, 2011 at 10:07 AM

    On the topic of died dairy products I looked up Margarine on Wikipedia after our conversation the other day and the dairy lobby made it illegal to add yellow food coloring to Margarine until the mid 20th century...

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine

    ReplyDelete
  8. Boston Scooter GuyApril 16, 2011 at 5:14 PM

    I grew up on individually packaged cheese. It was yellow and delicious. But now, I prefer swiss.

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