Let’s talk about cheese.
What the hell is cheese? Why does it exist? Think for a moment about what cheese really is. At some point in the antediluvian past, some blockheaded ancient saw an aurochs’ calf sucking at the udders and thought “that looks like something I want in my mouth!”
This ‘enterprising’ individual then managed to catch the half-ton herbivore, put it in a pen, and proceeded to steal the juice that came out when he squeezed the nipples. Keep in mind that at this time, humans did not have the mutation necessary to digest milk. Lactose intolerance is the norm in the human genome until some European shepherds developed lactase persistence some 10,000 years ago. So this guy caught what is basically a monster, sexually assaulted it, and put the milk, which was farty, stomach-ache-inducing poison to him, in some kind of vessel for later.
That’s how we get to humans keeping milk around. But our friend isn’t done there, not by a long shot. Next, our friend kills the cow’s calf, opens up its steaming guts full of partially digested milky goop, and mixes some of the guts into the quickly spoiling milk. Why? Who knows? This man is not beholden to reason or decency. But those steaming, squeaky guts are full of rennet, the mixture of enzymes the calf uses to digest the milk, and, whether intentionally or not, our blatantly depraved ancient friend has just added the one ingredient in the world that could turn milk from fresh, indigestible nipple-juice into partially rotten, bacteria-laced, and (most importantly) digestible cheese.
Our innovative ancestor captures half-ton monster, squeezes its nipples, drinks the shit that comes out of it, got tremendously ill, then killed that monster’s child, cut its guts open, decided to add some gut juice to the white stuff that got him sick, waited a few months until the liquid milk had curdled, fermented, and turned into a soft moldy mass, and then put that stuff on crackers and figured he had a real good thing going.
Realistically, the development of cheese likely happened more gradually, and perhaps a tad more logically, but the nature of cheese itself is sort of a bizarre thing if you think about it.
The earliest examples of cheesemaking seem to come from Europe, though evidence also points to the Middle East, and Anatolia, where sheep and goats were likely the first to be milked, being kept already for wool and meat. There is evidence of dairy harvesting in Africa from 5000 BCE, which indicates that the lactose tolerance which is predominant in European populations may have developed in migratory groups in Africa first.
An old legend says that cheese was discovered by Arab traders who stored milk in the stomachs of young calves and came back to find it separated into curds and whey. It’s possible that the introduction of rennet into the mixture was a result of the storage methods-- it wasn’t out of the ordinary to use animal organs as containers.
I think the point still stands, however. Cheese is a tremendously odd thing to be a part of our diets, and it seems incredibly unlikely to have come into existence at all. And yet, here it is, smelly, gooey, and delicious.
