American Cheese Surplus Reaches Record High

I also wouldn't classify Kraft slices or Velveeta as cheese, and the FDA doesn't either.

Not trying to antagonize here, but mainly wondering if you have a nuanced reason? The consensus is generally that the Bay Area doesn't have very good food, without even adjusting for the cost of living.

I immigrated from India to North America very young (in elementary school), but this was true for me as well, and it took a long time for me to _understand_ cheese and its varieties. I'd expand on that and say that the same held true for bread, jams and jellies, and cured meats as well.

My mental model of cheese was "gummy plastic Kraft slices", and I didn't eat much of those because they didn't provide much in the way of taste. My mental model of bread was "gummy white wonder-bread". My mental model of jams and jellies was some generic bottle of smuckers strawberry. My mental model of cured meats was some oversalted hunk of ham. Mental model of syrup was a bottle of Aunt Jemimah's.

It was a full 15 years of living here before it dawned on me the rich variety of tastes and textures that comprised these foods, and how they could be combined and incorporated into meals. Most of that I owe to eating (out of a sense of obligation) home-made high-quality food prepared by people who had invited me to their homes. Even then, it took a few years until I put two and two together and made the connection that somehow _these people_ were making delicious things out of these foods, and I was somehow not encountering them myself in my own choices.

When I finally burst through to the other side of that, it was a revelation. Cheese was cheddar and jack and gouda and brie and oka and all sorts of other wonderful tastes and textures. Bread was rye and sourdough and pumpernickel and calabrese. Jams were rhubarb and black currant and ginger and marmalade. Cured meats were kolbasa and proscuitto and genoa and soprasatta. Syrups were maple and molasses.

In my childhood days in India, we would sometimes go out and buy exotic "western" food from the store - and this was before India's markets had opened up - so what you were able to obtain were all these singular examples - Wonderbread white, some generic paste of a jam, some processed cheese.

We would eat these and the novelty would hold my interest, but at the back of my mind I felt a bit sorry for those westerners. "This is all they subsist on?" I would wonder.. "how sad".

That implicit bias stayed with me as a child, even after I came over, and influenced my choices in food. Even with all the opportunity to sample a broader range of examples, one must _motivate_ oneself to do so. You have to go out of your way to go to a cheese shop, and try a few, and experiment with them. Why do that when you have already made up your mind that there is nothing more there than what you have already seen?

It was a revelatory event when I finally understood what I was missing, and how I had ended up in that circumstance, and how my biases had guided me into a constrained existence where I had denied myself exposure to these wonderful things.

I take it as a lesson learned, more generally, about prior biases and how they can influence my choices so that I mold my own environment to be blind to things I could otherwise have experienced.

I wonder if someone will ever come up with simulated carbs, without using artificial sweeteners, made from meat & fat. Imagine simulated bread made from 100% chicken.

A close second would be a blue cheese such as St. Agur.

Both with a lot of umami goodness on the burger.

I will happily eat a burger with American cheese. It is good - but not cheese to me. It is more an oily softness than the smooth fatty softness from (dare I say real) cheese.

Maybe this comes from growing up where a "cheese shop" actually is a thing :-)

But cheese fries with american cheese are truly sinful and a very guilty pleasure. They're not common around here for which my heart is eternally thankful!

Pasteurized Process Cheese - Cheese that has been made by melting together a bunch of cheeses (Colby, Cheddar, etc.) and emulsifiers. Singles from decent brands (e.g. Boar's Head) are tasty additions to burgers. Highly desirable meltiness qualities.

Pasteurized Process Cheese Food - Like the above, but less 'cheese' and more 'approved other stuff'. Kraft singles, for example.

Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread - Even less cheese, more moisture and other stuff. Designed for melting into queso, etc. Think Velveeta blocks.

Pasteurized Process American Slices - Definitely not cheese. An oil based product. Meant to mimic the desirable melty qualities of Process Cheese.

Yes.

> How is there, for example, any such thing as a good/great chef, one being better than another, if it's all just 'subjective'?

“good” and “great” are invariably either relative to some specific purpose or subjective.

> It's proverbial that there's no arguing about taste (in the broader sense), but it's also a commonplace that nothing else is worth arguing about.

I disagree with the second half. It's sometimes worth arguing to the point of determining that the source of disagreement is a fundamental difference in taste (or, say, root moral principles, which aren't really that different from a logical point of view.) But once you've reached that point, there is no further use in arguing.

No, it's not. I don't know what he ideal grilled cheese is, but you can get many, much better, grilled cheeses by not using the first two of those items. Lots of butter is spot on, though.

As someone who cooks grilled cheese sandwiches for a family twice a week, and likes to experiment, I can tell you that cheddar or gruyere, mass-produced white bread, and lots of mayonnaise, is preferred by some.

And someone else will chime in with something else. I don't know what the 'ideal' grilled cheese sandwich is, but I'm willing to wager a lot of people think it isn't made with American cheese.

You savage. You slice your own Velveeta for grilled cheese. In fact, I think that sounds good right now.

butter 2 slices of whitebread, place cheddar cheese (doesn't matter the type.. nothing aged) and pan fry. It's just enough to toast the bread and melt the cheese. American cheese will have a weird flavor.

Part of the problem here is that storing milk as cheese is fine if you assume that in the future there will be less milk/cheese and you'll be able to unload your current stock. This will eventually happen, but along the way you're just going to see a ton of dairy farmers go under and who knows how long it's going to take for the market to stabilize"