Carrion Luggage

Cheesed Off

The random number gods have once again trolled me. Here's another one from Mental Floss:

    What's the White Stuff on Cheese?  

Well, now, that depends. Snow? Cocaine? Talcum powder? Flour? Bread crumbs? I can think of at least one other possibility, but although I love cheese, I don't love it that much.

If your taste in cheese has evolved beyond the individually-wrapped processed American slices and into blocks of the hard stuff—like cheddar—you’ve probably noticed that some cheeses can develop a chalky white substance on their surface.

"Individually-wrapped processed American slices" are, unless we twist its definition beyond recognition, not cheese.

At first glance, it looks like mold. It’s usually not a good idea to eat mold.

Godsdammit, MF. This is why I don't trust you. A lot of cheese owes its entire existence to mold. What we call "mold" is a particular form of fungus, and, just as with more macroscopic fungi such as mushrooms, some are beneficial, some are neutral, and some are poisonous. Hell, penicillin is a mold.

I can understand being put off by it, much like I can (just barely) understand not liking cheese in general, but that there is either misinformation or anti-mold propaganda, or both.

Is it fungus? Or is your cheese harmless and just making you paranoid?

And, again, poorly phrased. Yes, some fungi are inedible (or, more precisely, edible only once). And if you reach into the back of your dairy drawer and pull out a biology project, I can't blame you for throwing that shit away. I'd do it.

The real question, though, the one I think they intended but maybe worded less than ideally, is simply "is it safe or not?" And that's absolutely legitimate.

It’s probably fine.

"Probably" doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence here, as, in the event that it's not fine, the result could be death or, worse, three days on the toilet.

The white stuff seen on cheddar is typically calcium lactate, which is the result of lactic acid interacting with calcium.

Both of which are rather famously found in milk, which, it might surprise you to discover, is what cheese is made from.

Someone once said something like "cheese is milk's attempt at immortality," and I laughed. Poetic, but there's some truth in it.

Anything "lactic" is milk-related. And yes, this includes "galactic." The general name for galaxies was derived from the name of our Milky Way. Not kidding here.

But I digress. There's no actual milk in the sky (as far as we know), though we know there's ethanol out there. Nor is there cheese (again, as far as we know). No, not even the Moon.

As cheese ages, some of the moisture moves to the surface, and the lactate moves with it. When that water ebbs, the lactate remains behind and can appear as powdery, crystal-like particles on the surface of the cheese.

"Crystal-like?" Okay, fine. I won't be pedantic about this one.

Calcium lactate is completely harmless. It might even be a sign the cheese has matured and is therefore tastier. But it’s also remarkably similar in appearance to mold. So how can you tell the difference?

Given the fast-and-loose definitional problems so far, I'd highly recommend double-checking any of the advice here with another source.

So why am I sharing this article if I don't fully trust it? Mostly just so I could quote this sentence:

Fondling the cheese should give you some indication of which is which.

I'm just going to pause for a moment here.

Okay.

Italian, Swiss, and Dutch cheeses may have visible Lactobacillus helveticus, which is added to helped create amino acids for flavor.

Okay, so, this is where years of learning about chemistry, biology, and Latin pay off. Low-information consumers might see that and freak out over the number of syllables. "Don't eat anything you can't pronounce" is one of the most ignorant and misleading pieces of advice floating around out there. Let's break it down:

Lacto - like I said, milk.
bacillus - bacteria (bacteria are not fungi, but, as with fungi or any other genus of organisms, there's the good, the bad, and the ugly)
helveticus - the Romans called the area now known as Switzerland "Helvetia." Yes, that's also the root of the name of one of the more popular typeset fonts.

In the end, I'm not going to rag on anyone for discarding something that's grown an ugly fuzz, unless we're talking about your teenage son. We don't generally have laboratories in our homes (if you do, I'll back into the hedge here), and even if you're an expert in biology and/or chemistry (which, I should emphasize, I am not), the term "better safe than sorry" applies.

Still, knowledge is power. And cheese is delicious.