▲ 53 points
back
51 comments
So...perhaps the author of this marginalia is questioning whether cheese thinks (or is alive in some sense), rather than whether making cheese is a rational pursuit? The next one "Is cheese animal, and do we eat it alive?" makes me think it's much more likely the former than the latter.
That would be an interesting question, and maybe illuminating of the general knowledge about microscopic processes back then. Some cheese, of course, has bacterial cultures involved in the making of, and so some cheese is alive, by some definition. In the usual case, though, I guess it is adding acid to milk/cream and letting it coagulate into curds and then pressing it; so the answer is probably mostly no, if we assume a relatively clean environment for making and storing the cheese. But, perhaps the writer of the marginalia is wondering if it is a process like making beer, or other fermentation that is actually using live cultures (I don't know how well the "liveness" of yeast and other cultures was understood back then; though I suspect they understood it better than the average modern non-baker/non-brewer, since so many people made their own bread and beer).
> Some cheese, of course, has bacterial cultures involved in the making of
Many (most?) matured unprocessed soft cheeses of the old world involve molds, usually on the rind though blue cheeses are struck through with mold veins (the fuzzy blue-green): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_cheese#Mold
Reminds me of the debate over the liveness of a strawberry on the BBC podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w/episodes/downloads
"Some cheese"? All cheeses worth savouring are cultured. All cheddar (probably the most popular cheese globally) is cultured. The only cheeses that aren't cultured are things like uncultured mozzarella or queso fresco.
"All cheeses worth savouring are cultured."
I'm rather fond of a wide variety of fresh cheeses. Paneer, and other sorts of "farmers cheese" and cottage cheese are all made with just acid curdling and aren't cultured. Most mozzarella, and many other soft cheeses, can and are made without cultures.
I'm not an expert on the subject, by any means, but there's a huge variety of things we call "cheese" and they're made in a pretty wide variety of ways. More importantly might be what kinds of cheeses people were aware of and making back when this note-taker was thinking these thoughts and asking these questions about cheese. Were cultured cheeses common in his region and time? I dunno and the article doesn't reveal it. There have been times and places where "cheese" meant a fresh cheese like paneer or cottage cheese, but probably other times and places when bacterial cultures were involved in all or most cheese production. I suspect the further back we go, the more likely we are to find fresh cheeses being more common than the cultured cheeses since they were simpler to make, but I dunno. The ability to store a hard cheese without refrigeration would have been pretty valuable to pre-industrial society.
I like mozzarella, but I don't savour it. Some dishes call for cottage cheese as an ingredient, but I don't nibble on cottage cheese at a wine tasting. To me, these are two very different things.
It seems to me that both the manuscript and its annotations are being entirely misinterpreted by the other commenters here. It doesn't help that the article in question is giving so few details or context.
Near as I can tell, the manuscript is creating some sort of allegory whereby a creator god (in this case that of Christianity) creates humanity, to be compared with the way that humans create or make cheese.
In that context, the "is cheese rational?" annotation is expressing doubt at the validity of the comparison, by pointing out that the distinguishing feature of humans is their ability to think (to reason or be rational).
The second annotation about cheese being animal and eaten seems to further criticize the comparison by pointing out that human is to cheese not as creator is to humanity.
At least without some deep theological background into the time and place of the writings, that would be my interpretation.
One of the things that's most impressive about humans is that, despite needing somewhere between 1200-2000 calories per day to survive, humans have managed to not only find that number pretty much anywhere on the planet, but find enough variety to provide for all essential nutrients.
For example, I was idly watching this documentary [1] and there's a point where the subject of the film ends up living with some natives of micronesia. Here's the relevant bit https://youtu.be/-qSXyz3he3M?t=899
Despite living on a tiny dot of land surrounded by undrinkable liquid and virtually no major sources of fresh water. These folks have managed to find that many calories x 150 people and get enough variety to get all of their major macro and micro nutrients covered. They've been successful enough at this to have made a successful go at it for thousands of years. And if you look at the people, they're not at near starvation levels of food.
And we find this everywhere on the planet, humans of the same species, managed to spread to nearly every corner of the planet thousands upon thousands of years ago survive and thrive. That's amazing.
There's lots of comments that remark on what you end up eating when you're starving. But I think the pattern is in many ways the opposite. Humans have been successful everywhere they could walk, climb or get to on a boat. Most of human habitation is one of getting enough to eat most of the time, at least long enough to reproduce and raise the next generation to the point that they can feed themselves.
Another point is that humans have had various preservation techniques, in almost every society I know of, dating back into pre-history. The idea that you can apply a set of techniques that work one place to another makes complete sense.
Cheese is likely the result of a very deliberate process and patience rather than a starving person desperately shoving anything that might have digestible calories into their mouth.
Cheese is a way of making milk edible. Before cheese humans couldnt digest milk. Someone let a bunch of useless milk set out and realized the result was pretty tasty, hence we have cheese.
I have to wonder what was going through the mind of the first person who stored some milk in a sheep's stomach, waited a few days, and decided, "Hey, this coagulated mess looks like something I'd like to eat"
You don’t have to wait a few days for rennet to work. It will coagulate the milk in minutes.
In the past when everyone lived on the edge of starvation you could not be so fussy in what you ate. If you really want to see what starvation will make people eat take a look (from a great distance and upwind) at Hákarl [1].
I tried this – on a visit to Iceland, my (older) family friend / impromptu tour guide made me and my traveling companions taste it. The young Icelandic locals in the rest area laughed their asses off and snapchatted the whole thing, because "no one eats that anymore, it's for old people obsessed with traditions." Makes sense, it was truly disgusting. The Hvalspik (https://guidetoiceland.is/history-culture/the-worlds-most-di...) really was quite interesting though.
Some traditions deserve to die. Another one that I will not be sad to see go the way of the dodo is Surströmming [1]. I love the quote from Wolfgang Fassbender "the biggest challenge when eating surströmming is to vomit only after the first bite, as opposed to before”.
>If you really want to see what starvation will make people eat
Apart from the smell, this is not different from tons of other cured meats, salami, beef jerky etc (actually, beef jerky doesn't smell that nice, either).
More of a cultural thing than starvation? Especially since Icelanders are pretty well off, and as far from starvation as possible and still eat it...
I think you should look into what the Greenland shark is as it is not your normal mystery meat [1].
I am pretty impressed that icelanders worked out how you could eat such an animal - who would have guessed burying it in the ground, urinating on the grave, and then coming back six month later was the difference between death and total disgust.
The Icelandic people might not be starving today, but they certainly had a hard time in the past.
I am skeptical of all of the replies so far implying that the threat of imminent starvation is what drove people to discover weird foods. We're intelligent omnivores, we like finding and trying new foods. Finding as many food sources as possible is one of the essential tasks of a group of humans living in subsistence conditions. Note the distinction between subsistence and starvation.
What went through their mind? Perhaps that milk spoils way too quickly and food that you can store for long periods of time is vital for survival. They probably would have known a great deal about the preparation and preservation of food in general, like the use of fire or that drying and covering food makes it last much longer.
Their tolerance for food with strong unpleasant flavors would have been much higher than yours or mine and they would have had knowledge on how to test potentially dangerous substances to see how edible they are.
If you stored milk in a stomach, it would coagulate very quickly. The substance would be solid: something you can dry! Aha. This could be a good way to store surplus milk.
Early homo sapiens were pretty smart and had skills few of us today possess.
Exactly, it would be odd if early humans were less creative than today. The main difference seems to be infrastructure and they didn't have the positive feedback englightment loops the developed world does today.
> If you stored milk in a stomach, it would coagulate very quickly. The substance would be solid: something you can dry! Aha. This could be a good way to store surplus milk.
You can make cheese without any sheep stomach involved, so it was probably more of an "Ah ha! Faster cheese!" sort of moment.
Even though some cheeses are made without rennet, it seems more likely that the easier method with rennet would have been discovered first. It seems tricky to get the milk to coagulate into curds before turning sour unless you have rennet.
Well, that and the fact that fresh cheese actually smells nice.
I think a lot of the people replying here are thinking "yogurt" when they ought to be thinking "fresh farmers cheese."
The answer is the same as the people who gave oysters or crabs a try... when you're starving you'll try literally anything. When it doesn't turn out to be toxic, or make you feel ill, that's something you stick with. Something like cheese is even better, since you can turn a wasted surplus into portable, stored calories.
Probably they made a waterbag from the stomach and stored milk in it.
It's more probable that the original was a goat:
"Upon killing a kid, a farmer simply takes its milk-filled stomach, ties it off in a tight knot or sews it shut, perhaps covers it in mesh to keep the flies off, then hangs it from the ceiling of a cool, dark room. He then waits for a few months until the natural rennet within curdles and hardens the milk into a thick, creamy cheese..."
I suspect a lot of substances we now know to be edible were first tested on prisoners.
They didn't really keep prisoners back then, certainly not for long periods of time.
Jailing someone is a relatively modern invention, back then they preferred corporal punishment (lashing most often).
What about slaves?
Slaves they had, but were far too valuable to use for testing things like this. Only kings and such could afford to waste salves that way.
And anyone rich enough to have slaves probably did not need to test random foods since they already had what they needed.
War captives maybe, or those condemned to die, but those are state things, and the state is unlikely to need to test foods.
They most likely used animals, same as we do today. Dogs would be my guess.
People weren't always such wimps as we are today :-)
They might have been starving at the time.
Thousand-year eggs? Stinkheads? Casu Marzu? Hakari? I'm pretty sure all of these were a starving person digging up their old trash, looking at it and making a hard decision.
Not even that hard a decision if you're starving, especially when it doesn't make you crap liquid and die.
Cheese is more than just tolerable: by reducing the amount of lactose present, it turns milk into a food for lactose-intolerant adults. It is thought that adult lactose intolerance was the primal state of humanity, and that cheese consumption was a step on the way to adult tolerance, in those cultures that developed it.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/abs/nature11...
> It is thought that adult lactose intolerance was the primal state of humanity
It's not just a thought, the lactose tolerance mutations have been reasonably well tracked in time and space.
> cheese consumption was a step on the way to adult tolerance, in those cultures that developed it.
That however doesn't make much sense, most cheese-based cultures remain broadly lactose-intolerant. Some of the earliest cheese evidences come from the middle-east, northern africa and central asia, which have limited to very limited rates of adult lactase persistence.
If you look at Europe's map of lactase persistence, rates fall as you head south, where the oldest evidence of cheese-making cultures are, cheese spread from the south but lactase persistence spread from the north (Roman authors specifically recorded germanic tribes/cultures as drinkers of raw milk), more closely linked to vitamin D intake necessity.
Yes, and lactose tolerance in adulthood seems to have evolved quite recently (7000 BC IIRC). Of course, human infants are already lactose tolerant (so they can suckle). I'm guessing the switch-off evolvee for involuntary weening, and had survival value.
I believe bread, beer and wine pre-date cheese, and so the idea of a transformation through some agent wasn't that far-fetched. And milk obviously is nutritous. I'm not sure, but can you make sorta cheese, in the way that rotting fruit is natural fermentation, and dough can rise from wild-yeast (and unlevened bread was being eaten already). Once the idea is born, you can work to improve it.
It's easy to think of primitive humans as dummies, but they were probably smarter than most of us, and once they got an idea, they would tweak it. Plus, it only takes one clever and lucky person in a network of communities to hit on an improvement, for it to spread.
But there's a question of why the lactose tolerant mutation spread so widely... was there a starvation event? An outcompeting, or invasion by stronger, milk-fed warriors?
But I expect cheese making eating was very wide-spread well before this event, and it was a great source of calories. Blessed are the cheese makers.
The first person to discover their edibility would not have known if they were about to crap liquid until they died when they ate it, but they likely would have known that in general rotten food can make you ill, hence the hard decision, chancing survival against a potentially earlier death.
The fact that any of us are here to have this chat leads me to believe that the basic principles of testing edibility have been handed down since antiquity. Smell it. "Oh that's rank! Yet, I am starving." Touch it to your lips. "They're not numb! Result." Touch it to your tongue. "No burning, no numbness, no tingling, good!" Eat a very little bit, "Tastes better than I'd have thought." Wait. "I'm alive, and I feel a very little bit less hungry!" Eat some more. "I'm not hungry, I don't have dysentery, and I can still see."
Not even starving. Look up ashens on YouTube. Maybe it was just for kicks.
I have to wonder what was going through the mind of somebody who selected the username "douche".
It means "shower" in French.
When you know virtually nothing accurate about how the world works, anything can be a source of wonder and irrationality; that's my takeaway from the quoted portions of that manuscript.
Is eating cheese rational?
I'm reminded of a statement by Jeremy Clarkson about the possibility of nutritional warning labels on cheese. Without substantial nutritional value[1], being essentially just calories, the rational decision is to not eat it. But we do. His point was that if things like soda (Coke) is going to be labelled or taxed as unhealthy, why not cheese? For some historical or cultural reason why see cheese as something wholesome or "natural". Is is? It seems to me more a trick of chemistry, a means of preserving caloric content from a time when getting enough calories was the only concern.
[1] While cheese does contain some nutrients, you have to eat piles of it to get anywhere near a recommended daily dose, by which point you've eaten far more calories than anyone would consider healthy.
For below:
Vitamin D in Cheese: 1oz = 2% of daily value.
100/2 = 50 oz to get your daily minimum of D from cheese.
50oz of cheese = 1.5kg = 5700 calories + bowel obstruction = Not a rational way of getting your daily Vitamin D.
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-HealthProfessiona...
Cheese contains huge quantities of fat and protein, both of which are nutrients that I want to eat. What on earth do you mean by "without substantial nutritional value"? Are you of the impression that calories are bad? Listen, my doctor says that if I don't get at least a thousand calories a day, I might die.
Sure - but apply that same logic to Coke.
By weight, Coke is 10% sugar, 4% sodium, 2% potassium and the rest water (with trace amounts of fat and proteins). To a close approximation, Coke's calories are 100% sugars.
Still a substantial contribution towards those thousand calories/day that GP was after.
So eat other things than just cheese?