Free Republic

The village of Stilton has been banned from making its namesake cheese after EU officials ruled it originated in another part of England. Under European law, the renowned blue cheese can only be produced in Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Controversy arose when the Bells Inn in Stilton, Cambridgeshire, announced it wished to name their own blue-veined cheese after the village—rather than “Bells Blue”, which they have been forced to do. However, in a landmark decision that the pub has branded unfair, an application submitted by the Original Cheese Company to amend the EU Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) ruling has...

Shelburne Farms' clothbound cheddar has a bright yellow color because it's made from the milk of cows that graze on grasses high in beta-carotene. The news from Kraft last week that the company is ditching two artificial dyes in some versions of its macaroni and cheese products left me with a question.Why did we start coloring cheeses orange to begin with? Turns out there's a curious history here.In theory, cheese should be whitish — similar to the color of milk, right?Well, not really. Centuries ago in England, lots of cheeses had a natural yellowish-orange pigment. The cheese came from the...

(Phys.org)—As a young archaeologist, Peter Bogucki based his groundbreaking theory on the development of Western civilization on the most ancient of human technology, pottery. But it took some of the most modern developments in biochemistry—and 30 years —finally to confirm he was right. While working as director of studies at one of Princeton University's residential colleges in the 1980s, Bogucki theorized that the development of cheese-making in Europe—a critical indicator of an agricultural revolution—occurred thousands of years earlier than scientists generally believed. His insight, based on a study of perforated potsherds that Bogucki helped recover from dig sites in Poland,...

For some cheese lovers, the older and stinkier the cheese, the better. Well, what about a cheese that's been aging for 3,600 years? Yellow lumps, believed to be the world's oldest cheese, were found on mummies buried in the Taklamakan Desert in northwestern China. The cheese, which was found during archaeological excavations that took place between 2002 and 2004, dates to as early as 1615 BC. The cheese was found on the necks and chests of the mummies. The multiple layers of cowhide the mummies were buried in, and the dry, salty desert helped preserve the cheese....

Traces of dairy fat in ancient ceramic fragments suggest that people have been making cheese in Europe for up to 7,500 years. In the tough days before refrigerators, early dairy farmers probably devised cheese-making as a way to preserve, and get the best use out of, milk from the cattle that they had begun to herd. Peter Bogucki, an archaeologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, was in the 1980s among the first to suspect that cheese-making might have been afoot in Europe as early as 5,500 bc. He noticed that archaeologists working at ancient cattle-rearing sites in what is...