Salt Sugar Fat

by Michael Moss

  This deployment of cheese as a food additive has proven to be a windfall for food companies, driving up sales of cheese as well as the products that now use it to increase their allure. As a result, Kraft has become not only the largest cheese maker, it has climbed to the top of all food manufacturing. For consumers, however, the results may be far less thrilling. Cheese as an additive, with all of its undeniable bliss, has equally big implications for overeating.

  The first step in the industrialization of cheese came in 1912 when a thirty-eight-year-old Chicago street peddler named James Lewis Kraft found his calling. He had been selling traditional cheddar to grocers from a horse-drawn cart, rising before dawn each day to get his cheese from the South Water Street market downtown, the pricey, high-quality stuff his customers valued. Sales were strong, but there was one problem: constant spoilage, which ate into his profits. “Made up loss-and-gain account for December,” he wrote in his diary. “Found loss of seventeen cents. Worse than I expected.”

  Some grocers wouldn’t buy his cheese at all in the summer, because it wilted in the heat. Others grumbled about how much was getting wasted each time they sliced off a wedge for a customer and a hard crust formed on the exposed surface. Kraft lost no time in trying to salvage his livelihood. He had no formal training in food chemistry. His first job, after leaving the family’s farm in Ontario, had been clerking in a grocery store. Undeterred, he started tinkering at night in the boarding house where he lived. He ground up several kinds of cheddar, and cooked them in a copper kettle, ending up with a glop of stringy, greasy goo. The heat separated the oil and protein molecules, leaving Kraft with an unsightly mess.

  The experimentation went on more or less for three years until, one day in 1915, Kraft stumbled upon a solution. He was stirring a pot of cheese continuously as it melted, for fifteen minutes. When he looked down at the pot, he saw that the fat hadn’t bled out. The agitation from the continual stirring had kept the fats and proteins together. Now smooth and homogenized, the mixture poured easily into containers, where it solidified again. He rounded up some 3½- and 7½-ounce cans, sterilized them, filled them with the cheese, and embossed the label with his name, “Kraft Cheese,” and a promise that would soon get the whole country excited: This was a “cheese of creamy richness” that “will keep in any climate.” Before long, he ditched the horse and cart. He needed trucks to fill all the grocery store orders for his cheese-in-a-can.

  Traditional cheese makers were appalled. They tried to get lawmakers to force Kraft to label his canned cheese with any number of caustic descriptors, including embalmed, imitation, made-over, and renovated. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the manufacture of cheese and other dairy products, finally settled on a variety of more palatable terms like “American cheese food” and “American cheese product.” But the name that stuck came from Kraft’s own patent, in which he described his invention as a “process of sterilizing cheese and an improved product produced by such process.” Henceforth, the broad category of cheese that is industrially improved became known as “processed cheese.”

  Notwithstanding the critics, Kraft’s cheese turned out to be a perfect field ration for soldiers. He sold six million pounds to the federal government in World War I, and the idea of cheese that could sit around for months on end without needing refrigeration gradually caught on with grocers, too. Given the demands of the job, Kraft was soon joined in business by his four brothers, and by 1923 they had turned their company into the largest cheese manufacturer in the world, adding factories and an endless stream of new technology that sped up the fabrication while lowering production costs.

  One of its most popular brands was Velveeta, which Kraft didn’t invent but acquired from another entrepreneur in 1928. Velveeta was made directly from milk, milk fat, and the whey that dairies previously discarded. The stirring that Kraft had done in his copper kettle was replaced by sodium phosphate, a chemical additive, which acts as an emulsifier and prevents the fat from separating from the protein in milk. It also more than doubled the sodium content of processed cheese, and it siphoned away—via the chemicals—much of the cheese flavor, which is why processed cheese tastes so mild.

  Over the ensuing decades, the technicians at Kraft pulled off one miracle after another in making the fabrication of processed cheese faster and cheaper. In the 1940s, James Kraft’s brother Norman invented a contraption called the chill roller on which hot, melted processed cheese was rapidly cooled so that it could be cut into thin slices. By the 1960s, those slices were getting individually wrapped in plastic for minimum mess and maximum convenience. In the 1970s, enzymes were being used in larger amounts to shorten the aging and flavoring process, which spurred a 70 percent jump in production that decade.

  But the crowning achievement came in 1985, when Kraft opened two factories in Minnesota and Arkansas that used cutting-edge technology to speed up the process like never before. Kraft still produced huge amounts of natural cheese (cheddar, Swiss, mozzarella), which required as many as eighteen months or more, start to finish, to reach ripeness. But for years, company officials had been dreaming of a better, less costly way, even creating a “SWAT team” of technologists and presenting them with a challenge: “Forget about the way cheese is made today. Look at the problem with fresh eyes.”

  Nearly a decade had passed, but with the two new factories up and running, the revolution could begin. In one single continuous process, fresh milk would enter one side of the plants and come out the other end as cheese. In between, the milk was put through a rigorous straining called ultrafiltration, enzymes were added at various stages and agitators worked with the chemical emulsifiers to keep the fat molecules blended in. Where traditional cheese took a year and a half or more to prepare and age, the new process whittled that time down to mere days. This final innovation got a name to match its grandeur: “Milk in, cheese out,” as they said at Kraft.

  With the making of cheese taken to warp speed, all that was left was getting people to eat more of it, and this was no easy feat. It would require the combined efforts of the dairy industry, the federal government, and Kraft all pulling together to overcome a major hurdle: The people were not so inclined.

  By 1985, in fact, much of the country was trying to avoid high-fat dairy products, especially milk. Women and girls had led the way. In a long, slow—and, for the dairy industry, painful—shift that started in the 1950s, they had come to see milk as an easy and obvious sacrifice in watching their weight. A 12-ounce glass has 225 calories. Starting in the 1960s, the fat in milk was linked to heart disease as well. The same glass has 7.5 grams of saturated fat, or about half of a day’s recommended maximum. (Milk is also surprisingly flush with sugar; 12 ounces has four teaspoons of sugar from the lactose in the milk.) By 1988, for the first time ever, grocery stores were selling more lower-fat milk than whole milk.

  This effort by Americans to cut back on fat thrust the dairy industry into crisis. It was suddenly drowning in surplus whole milk, as well as the fat that was being taken out of whole milk to make the skim. This extracted fat is called milkfat, and it was piling up due to a simple fact of nature: Cows can’t make skim milk. They can make only full-fat milk, so milkfat became something that had to be removed and then stored somewhere. The dairy industry’s problem, however, was not just the cow’s mammary system. The cows that the industry increasingly came to own were no longer ordinary cows turning out modest sums of milk. They were milk machines. In the old days, dairy cows idled in pastures, just a few to a farm and tended by milkmaids, and they were mainly located in Wisconsin, where the cows had to expend a good deal of their energy just to stay warm. By the 1980s, however, the center for dairy was shifting to California, where balmy weather was only the start of big things to come for the milk cow. The typical dairy operation came to have herds of 500 to 2,000 cows, genetically bred through artificial insemination. They were moved into gigantic sheds where artificial lighting extended their workday. This industrialization, a
long with a heartier diet of corn and added fats, transformed the American dairy cow into a prodigious producer. Where each animal used to give barely a gallon and a half of milk a day, the modern cow puts out more than six gallons each. Six gallons of full-fat milk.

  If people were cutting back on milk, one might ask, why didn’t the dairies cut back on their production, rather than send it soaring to new heights? The answer is that they didn’t have to cut back. Milk is one of the most stunning examples of overproduction in the American food supply system, with huge consequences on obesity, but a bit of explanation is required to appreciate the industry’s full illogical splendor.

  Dairies are no ordinary companies. They are not beholden to the constraints of a free market economy. Since the 1930s, the federal government has viewed milk as vital to the nation’s health, and thus, it has labored to ensure that dairies never go under. It subsidized the industry by setting price supports and used taxpayer money to buy any and all surplus dairy products. As a result, the dairies didn’t have to bother with the normal commercial concerns in selling food. They didn’t have to mess with supersizing or target heavy users or concern themselves with any of the other marketing tactics deployed by food manufacturers to boost consumption. The government simply bought as much as the dairies could make.

  It wasn’t just milk that the government subsidized, either. It protected the milkfat as well, since the dairy industry couldn’t be expected to just toss the fat away and remain financially healthy. This had a consequence. With the cows making more milk than anyone wanted to drink and the milk that people did want to drink being stripped of its fat, the industry devised an ingenious solution: It started turning all that unwanted milk and extracted milkfat into something else. It started turning it into cheese, which soaks up milk and milkfat like a sponge. (One pound of cheese takes a gallon of milk off the dairy industry’s hands.) Production began to surge, and just like the excess milk, the dairies didn’t have to worry too much about selling the cheese. Whatever the grocers didn’t buy, the government did, citing its responsibility to subsidize the dairy industry.

  These government purchases hummed along rather quietly until 1981, when the dairies got greedy. By that point, there were so many operators sending so much excess milk and milkfat to cheese makers that the government was buying more cheese than it could ever give away. This cheese, along with surplus butter and dried milk, accumulated into a stack that weighed 1.9 billion pounds, and it cost taxpayers $4 billion a year. With more truckloads arriving daily, this milkfat mountain was growing faster than the national debt. The storage fees alone were running upwards of $1 million a day. It grew so large, in fact, that the government began secreting it away in caverns and a vast, abandoned limestone mine near Kansas City, where The Washington Post’s agriculture reporter described an astonishing scene: “Deep beneath the ground here, in more bags, barrels and boxes than the mind can imagine, the awesome triumphs of the prodigious American milk cow rest enshrined in dark, cool and costly comfort. What they’re keeping here is government-owned milk, butter and cheese. It keeps piling up, costing the treasury millions upon millions of dollars, and nobody knows what to do with it.”

  Enter the Reagan administration and its commitment to slash the federal budget. In looking around for programs to cut, the new secretary of agriculture, John Block, discovered the cheese vaults and set out to put a stop to the government’s buying of surplus, not to mention its storage fees. This required some astute wrangling on his part, since the mega-dairies wielded considerable political clout. At one point, Block felt compelled to perform a little show and tell. He requisitioned hunks of stored cheese that had grown moldy, and showed these to members of Congress who needed some extra convincing. Block’s stunt rankled some people, since so much of the stored cheese was, in fact, of the processed variety, which was designed to withstand being locked away. “Some of us were aggravated that this guy would hold up moldy cheese,” the executive vice president of the Kansas City storage facility said at the time. “Processed cheese will keep for five years under proper conditions.”

  Ultimately, Block won. Processed or not, the government stopped buying the excess dairy. Washington tried to help out by discouraging, in the form of incentives, excess production. It paid operators $955 million to make less milk, and the country’s dairies pledged to do their part by sending 339,000 milk cows to an early slaughter. This effort, however, was riddled with loopholes and ended with negligible results when the dairy operators simply rebuilt their herds by adding fresh cows.

  In 1983, a sympathetic Congress devised another solution. Cows weren’t the problem, the elected officials decided, not even the modern supercharged cow. The problem was the consumer, who had caused this whole surplus problem to start with. The people simply weren’t drinking enough milk, so Congress created a system to boost the consumption of dairy products. (The law was actually called the Dairy and Tobacco Adjustment Act, since it also offered some aid and comfort to the cigarette industry.) Under this plan, the federal government allowed a special assessment to be levied on every milk producer in the country, with the money to be spent on marketing schemes that were aimed at making milk and cheese more alluring.

  This left only one question: Why would people who shun fatty milk eat more fatty cheese?

  The answer, in part, is because they had no choice. There is no nonfat cheese worth eating, at least nothing that comes close to the real thing. The dairy industry has put some effort into finding a way to make low-fat cheese as attractive as low-fat milk, but by and large the taste and texture of these fat-stripped cheeses is appalling. As a result, more than 90 percent of the cheese sold today remains full fat.

  There is another reason, however, why people who shun whole milk will devour a full-fat cheese. Cheese has something going for it that whole milk does not: It is not as readily identified as a fatty food. True, cheese is loaded with fat, especially with saturated fat, the kind that is linked to heart disease. It has much less of the other kind of fat, unsaturated, that nutritionists have increasingly come to view as a good fat. Better sources of this good fat are oils like canola, olive, and safflower. But in one of the great perversions of nutritional science, the bad fat, saturated, doesn’t look or feel like fat. It remains solid at room temperature, where it locks up with the protein molecules and hides from view.

  Not everyone in the country is worried about fat, of course. There are many people who drink whole milk and eat cheese and eat it in huge quantities, enjoying it for its unique flavors and velvety mouthfeel. I met one such person in the winter of 2010, and his affection for cheese was a marvel to see. His name is Ulfert Broockmann, and he’s a German-born cheese expert who spent forty-seven years as a technician in the dairy industry. He did two five-year stints with Kraft, ending in 1984, though there is no love lost between him and the company. He said he won a substantial legal settlement from Kraft after being fired, which he attributed to his disgruntlement with the company’s turn toward speedier cheese production. He disliked especially the increased use of enzymes to replace the aging process. “They made everything cheaper,” he said during my visit to his home in Libertyville, Illinois, just twenty miles from the company’s headquarters. “It’s a shame.”

  As we talked cheese at his dining room table, I asked to see his larder. One entire shelf of his refrigerator was devoted to cheese. He had cheddar and jack, blue and Gorgonzola, Brie, Camembert, and Swiss, neatly arranged on ceramic plates. I started salivating, but eating cheese in the Broockmann household requires time and discipline. It can’t be rushed. Before he eats any cheese, he told me, he takes it out of the fridge and sets it on the counter to warm up to room temperature, which brings out the flavors and tang. For a man in his early seventies, Broockmann was impressively fit, tall, and slim, still capable of 100-mile rides on his bike, and he is unconcerned about the fat in his food. In fact, he credits his good health to a diet that is heavy on cheese.

  “I eat it in the morn
ing, with bread,” he told me. “It’s a European-type breakfast. We set out four or five types, with butter. And I eat it at night, with a glass of wine.” None of the cheese he buys, not an ounce, is made by Kraft. He said that he can taste high amounts of enzymes, and he prefers artisanal brands that still rely on eighteen months or more of aging.

  For all his love of cheese, however, Broockmann’s ways with the stuff were not going to fix the dairy industry’s problem of having too much milk and milkfat. He is way too particular about what he considers cheese and far too methodical in how he eats it. To triple the per capita consumption to 33 pounds, cheese would have to be eaten much faster, in newer, more convenient ways, and in much looser formulations. It wasn’t long after Broockmann left Kraft that officials there got to work on a more realistic solution to the milkfat mountain.

  In the early stages of its quest to make cheese more convenient to eat, Kraft stumbled badly. The company’s cheese division managers started with one of their biggest brands, Philadelphia Cream Cheese. The idea was that busy people would use cream cheese more readily if it was sold not in its famous foil-wrapped blocks but pre-sliced and -wrapped in 1.2-ounce portions. In May 1989, the company made three hundred thousand pounds of sliced cream cheese and shipped it to test markets in upstate New York and Kansas City. Kraft’s cheese division had predicted a jump in annual sales of $61 million and 27 million pounds of additional cheese being eaten, explaining its reasoning in an internal memo that was distributed that summer to other company officials. Cream cheese in brick form was being used mainly on bagels and toast, and only for breakfast. The new sliced version would extend that reach into lunch and dinner, with lots of new recipes made easier by the handiness of the slices. “The introduction of new forms of cream cheese drives cream cheese consumption,” the memo said. “Usage of cream cheese during lunch and dinner occasions represents a significant opportunity for greater cream cheese consumption.”