America’s cheese hoard continues to balloon to unprecedented levels, as producers fear the mountain could grow further and put even more dairy farmers out of business.
About 1.4 billion pounds of American, cheddar and other kinds of cheese is socked away at cold-storage warehouses across the country, the biggest stockpile since federal record-keeping began a century ago.
Driving the glut are cheese makers who ramped up production before trade tensions abroad tamped down demand for many of their products. Shifting tastes at home have further changed the outlook for traditional cheese makers. Many are paying to store their excess cheese in hopes demand and prices will improve.
“There’s a whole ton of aged product laying around,” said Nate Donnay, director of Dairy Market Insight at INTL FCStone Financial.
Cheese, which has a limited shelf-life, is less valuable once it spends weeks in cold-storage, and producers are concerned that the glut and price drop that has come with it could eat into profits. Spot market prices for 40-pound blocks of cheddar fell around 25% this year from 2014 prices, while 500-pound barrels typically used for processed cheese declined 28%.
Cheese exports have suffered since Mexico and China, major dairy buyers, instituted retaliatory tariffs on U.S. cheese and whey. Cheese shipments to Mexico in September were down more than 10% annually, according to the U.S. Dairy Export Council trade group, and shipments to China were down 63% annually.
That leaves U.S. dairy producers relying more on a domestic market where tastes are changing.
I love 4 yr old cheddar I've had 12 yr old, but to 'piquant'
I guess being in cold storage is not the same as aging
Asher Perez
Aging is an active process, where the bacteria add flavor. Cold storage is the opposite, where you're trying to stop the active processes. And the cold storage disrupts the water activity, which makes the cheese less tasty. If you put it in a cooked meal, it makes less difference. Also, I've never had 12 year old cheddar, but I feel like anything more than 5 is probably a waste.
Sebastian Scott
12 year cheddar is awesome, but you really can't eat it with anything more than a cracker, it's too powerful.
Dylan Nelson
I find 4 yrs is best for me, but I've tried 8 yr old cheddar that was quite good,
It's more than just aging , though
I've ate 2 yr old unpasteurized cheddar with those little crunchy crystals that was better than any longer aged cheese
Charles Allen
They dont even make the cheddar Americans buy in Cheddar gorge for fucks sake.
Austin Garcia
"It's good."
That's all Ed Zahn had to say about the taste of his 40-year-old cheddar that was sold like a precious metal yesterday at the Wisconsin Cheese Mart in Milwaukee—the oldest commercially available cheese in the world, while it lasted.
Mart owner Ken McNulty put it a different way. "It's definitely an extreme food. It's barely edible." He wasn't criticizing. He was trying to sell the stuff, after all. He just meant that the concentrated sharpness of the 40-pound block that had been aging in the back of a cooler in Oconto, Wisconsin, since the Nixon administration could only be taken in small doses.
Zahn, 73, made the cheese, along with a batch that's now 28 years old, while he was working at a now defunct cheese company. Later, when he ran his own shop in Oconto, the plastic-encased cheese housed in wooden boxes got pushed to the back of a cooler and forgotten. This year he was in the process of shutting the place down when he rediscovered the boxes—along with a 34-year-old batch—and began quietly selling it off to locals
Zahn and his extended family were on hand in Milwaukee for a ceremonial cutting of a block of the 28-year-old.
Samples were passed around. It was surprisingly creamy—not at all like a clothbound cheddar that loses moisture over time and becomes harder. But it was similarly mined with tiny bits of pinkish-orange crystallized amino acids, like flavor bombs that send chills down the back of your legs when you crunch into them. Like the man said, it was good. Really good. But I didn't think it terribly more intense than, say, Willi Lehner's two-year old bandaged cheddar..
Finally, the single employee who had possession of the remaining ten pounds of 40-year-old was located, and my team secured a few ounces. Again, it was creamy, sharp, crunchy, and delicious, but not a great measure more intense than the younger stuff we'd tried earlier. chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2012/10/08/the-oldest-edible-cheese-in-the-world So age don't count beyond 4 or 5 yrs
Some of the over stocked cheddar could be processed for Kraft Dinner(Bleeech), cheese sauces and canned
This would increase it's shelf life
Daniel Reyes
Cheesies
Asher Nelson
What's your favorite cheese, guys?
Cooper Reed
I don't think this thread and it's replies are actually about cheese, boys.
Landon James
Massive cheese glut, yet cheese prices stay the same
Levi Richardson
Companies and corporation would rather eat the profit loss than lower their prices. Just look at nvidia. Its becoming a growing trend that will fuck them over eventually
Isaac Morris
I see you think about cheese alot
Funky sweaty cheese
Anthony Barnes
He likes head-cheese
Isaac Bennett
That shit is fucking disgusting and can't even be legally sold as cheese.
Nolan Young
America produces cheese other than "american cheese" you dumb invalid.
Americans believe they produce Cheddar even though the only real Cheddar is produced in Cheddar gorge in Somerset in the UK. The clue is in the name Cheddar gorge you dumb ass Murricans.
Eli Rogers
I live in Cheddar, Wisconsin
We created cheddar
Wyatt Rivera
...
Jackson Baker
Alright, young'uns! Let me clue you in on a little history I lived through. I don't have time this morning to write you a synopsis, but you will learn a lot by perusing these links:
Government cheese was so disgusting! You are right though. Leave the 'problem' up to government, and the 'solution' will almost always turn out to be far worse than the 'problem' ever was!
Adam Smith
The problem is our government doesn't know what capitalism is, they only know how to justify more taxation any TRY (miserably I might add) to intervene in the market place.
Whats worse? More than half of Americans today (particularly youth) also do not know what capitalism is or how it really works, nor do they care either.
So the same thing will happen over and over in this now-failed State.
Jack Anderson
I was only talking about processed cheese you retard. Of course real cheese produced in the US is still real cheese. Do you purposely search out posts to misconstrue and get angry at?
For Goodness sake they should just give it to the poor, or better yet, give it to some small businesses that would HIRE poor people to work in order to sell that cheese! That is, if that cheese hasn't gone bad by now.
