Given the problems with plastic waste how can anyone justify individually wrapped cheese slices? (Constructive answers only please. I am genuinely interested in seeing if there are any arguments in favour.)
Why eat something so intensely boring, when there is so much great cheese out there?
The answer to your second question is: Texture. The way process (not "processed") cheese melts is definitely different than similar cheeses. There's a gooeyness and meltability that's unique for applications like a grilled cheese or burger, and good process cheese is just cheese that's been melted with a few salts.
It turns out there are many different American cheeses:
Pasteurized Process Cheese - Various cheeses melted together with an emulsifying agent.
Pasteurized Process Cheese Food - Mostly cheese, but with a higher % of 'the other stuff'.
Pasteurized Process American Slices - Not actually cheese. A vegetable oil horrorshow.
Not according to EU law. Over here, Kraft Singles could only be described as "processed slices (made using a blend of cheese, vegetable oils and milk proteins)".
As long as consumers are clearly informed about what they are eating (via labeling) and the food is safe for humans to consume, constructing a legal definition of products like 'cheese', 'ice cream', etc. just seems like pandering to interest groups.
If it weren’t forbidden, this product would be sold in a package showing cows and cheese wheels, with “CHEESE” in huge letters on it, and, in a place people wouldn’t look at and in tiny low-contrast letters, a remark that this is processed protein made from diary.
Personally I don't even like to buy pre-sliced cheese, never mind individually packaged slices. I have a perfectly reasonable cheese slicer, and a cheese knife for softer cheeses. We absolutely do not need plastic packages with 10 slices of cheese, separated by individual plastic sheets.
Most of the time the pre-sliced cheese also tastes worse, and tends to go sour-smelling after a day or two, once the package is opened. I find it extremely puzzling that we've managed to turn a thing meant to preserve dairy potentially for years, into something prone to spoiling extremely quickly.
There's a similar issue with pre-sliced serrano ham and other meats that are packaged with plastic sheets between them. Sure, it helps you to take out a single slice cleanly, but the plastic waste is insane. I'm not sure if there's a better packaging solution, but honestly I would just prefer to buy a whole piece of cured ham, and slice off thin pieces myself instead.
> Personally I don't even like to buy pre-sliced cheese, never mind individually packaged slices. I have a perfectly reasonable cheese slicer, and a cheese knife for softer cheeses. We absolutely do not need plastic packages with 10 slices of cheese, separated by individual plastic sheets.
Perhaps it's just a weird English mature cheddar thing, but half the joy of eating cheddar is trying to make nice clean slices and eating the extra bits that crumble off. If I'm making a sandwich only half the cheese I cut off goes into it, I eat the other half.
The creation, processing, transportation and recycling of plastics is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions[0] and other forms of industrial pollution like water table pollution from landfills.
A conservative estimate[1] puts 10% of all plastics created (from first world countries too) being deposited in the worlds oceans, to disastrous effects[2]. The US economy is one of, if not the largest, contributing factor to the above pacific plastic waste problem.
Even if we're better at recycling plastics than some countries (still pretty terrible at only ~10%) and not letting them leak out into the environment, the sheer volume we consume and dispose of still makes the US and other Western countries by FAR the biggest contributors to plastics pollution.
0: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/efficiency/industry/technical...
1: http://plastic-pollution.org/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
Yes is the answer...
A lot of the plastic waste from first world countries gets shipped to Asia (very cheap; the container ships are much emptier going back...). China received so much plastic waste that in January it banned imports. Consequently shipments to other Asian countries have skyrocketed. Many of these countries have terrible records for the amount of waste plastic washed into the ocean.
Some UK statistics:
- 475,000 tonnes of household plastic waste is recycled per year
- 800,000 tonnes of plastic waste [i.e. not all household] is exported to China, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.
- Those three countries are in the top 10 for plastic waste reaching the ocean.
Sources:
- https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-plastic-polluti...
But for that sort of fake American cheese that melts beautifully onto burgers if you shipped them packaged together the slices would merge together in a warm kitchen in my experience.
This is my experience as well. I still buy the yellow cheese because its lower melting point is more suitable for rapidly melting over things I want to melt it over.
Even though the theoretical shelf life may be the same regardless of packaging the block of cheese in a ziplock from the deli will go bad faster than wrapped singles, probably extra air (the same way bread in a large container goes stale faster than bread in a bag) and possibly because of a difference in preservatives. In practice singles have a much longer shelf life.
Everything has tradeoffs.