National Cheese Day

Today is a special day, because it is National Cheese Day!

This day is all about celebrating cheese! 🧀 Yes, cheese. Cheese is the dairy product produced from the milk of animals created by to coagulation of the milk protein called casein. These form curds. The curds are separated from the liquid whey and pressed into cheese. There are over one thousand kinds of cheeses, all of varying tastes, styles, textures, and flavors. The reason why there's so many is because of many factors, including the animal of origin, said animal's diet, pasteurization, and aging. 

Cheesemaking is a very old art. In fact, cheesemaking is so old, people were doing it before humans started recording history. As a result, we have no real concrete idea of how it started. One proposed origin of cheesemaking is that it was discovered around 8000 BCE, around the time humans domesticated sheep. The earliest preserved cheese was found in China, and it was around 3600 years old. Can't have been very tasty.

Despite this, cheese was practically unknown in East Asia, as well as the pre-Columbian Americas. It would be popular in Europe, the Middle East, and India. European colonization would spread the word about cheese as well as make it popular throughout the world.  

In 1815, Switzerland started producing cheese on a large industrial scale for the first time. However, the US would see real success in the mass production of cheese. A farmer named Jesse Williams from Rome, New York started an assembly line of cheese production using milk from neighboring farms. After World War II, traditional cheesemaking gave way to cheese factories, and factories have been the source of most of the cheese in the US and Europe ever since. If you want to learn more about this day and about cheese, you can look here.

So enjoy yourself a nice bit of cheese on this special day! Thanks for reading this blog entry! See you next time!