“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t,” Michael Pollan writes in his “Food Rules, an Eater’s Manual.” Few foods violate this edict more flagrantly than cheese powder, which seems supernatural in form and often in color. Yet Americans spend billions of dollars each year on boxed macaroni and cheese, cheese puffs, and nearly infinite permutations of “nacho cheese”-flavored snacks—perhaps because, as the food scientist Stephen Witherly has written, cheese is high in energy, fat, flavor compounds, and casein, a type of protein that, when digested, produces compounds called casomorphins, which “may have opioid-like effects in the body.” Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos, which are coated with the signature Doritos dust, recently analyzed by the Times, have become one of the chain’s most successful new products ever, with more than a billion dollars in sales since their introduction in March of last year.
Cheese may be “milk’s leap toward immortality,” as the writer Clifton Fadiman once put it, but until the development of processed cheese in the early twentieth century, it still readily spoiled. Processed cheese is made by heating and melting regular cheese and adding emulsifying salts, leaving it, as James L. Kraft stated in his patent application in 1916, in “such condition that it may be kept indefinitely without spoiling.” Kraft had great initial success selling some six million pounds of processed cheese to the U.S. government during the First World War; our taste for less than natural cheese products has thus been intertwined with war since the beginning.
But it turns out that an even better way to keep cheese from spoiling is to dehydrate it. In the most popular method, “spray-drying,” liquid is sprayed into a chamber and blasted with hot air. The liquid evaporates, and the remaining solid, a dry particle, is left behind. While Marco Polo reportedly encountered a type of powdered milk in thirteenth-century Mongolia, and the first patent for commercial spray-drying was awarded to Samuel Percy in 1872, the first industrial spray-dried dairy products weren’t manufactured until shortly after Kraft’s development of processed cheese in the nineteen-twenties, according to “
Food Powders: Physical Properties, Processing, and Functionality.”
Spray-drying first saw extensive use during the Second World War, granting near-immortality to otherwise perishable food products, from eggs to ice cream. So-called dehydrated cheese products, a category that includes both cheese powders and dried, grated cheese, “were developed for the U.S. Army … as a means of preserving cheese solids under conditions to which natural cheese would not normally be subjected,” according to “
The Fundamentals of Cheese Science.” (The rations of German soldiers also included powdered cheese.) Gradually, dehydrated cheese and packaged macaroni and cheese became staples over the course of the war.
A number of companies claim to have soon led the way in cheese powders, in particular a Danish processed-food company, Lactosan. According to the company, after one of its customers returned an order of processed cheese because he had nowhere to store it, a factory manager, Christian Jessen, began experimenting with melted cheese and industrial spray-driers, producing what we recognize as modern cheese powder in 1951; it was so successful that the company gave up manufacturing regular processed cheese to focus on powder. In the United States, Commercial Creamery, the proud owner of cheesepowder.com, claims to have “pioneered the manufacturing of cheese powders for the food industry over sixty years ago.”
A striking array of cheese products now come in dried, particulate form: the cheesiest, so to speak, would be a powder that is composed solely of cheese and perhaps emulsifying salts, with a moisture content of about five per cent or less. There is also “enzyme-modified cheese,” developed in the nineteen-sixties, whose flavors are so concentrated that it can have five to twenty times the punch of natural cheese; E.M.C.s, as they are known, are used to boost cheese flavor. Powders in which cheese is merely one of many ingredients, which often include E.M.C., whey, and other dairy byproducts, became increasingly common over the course of the twentieth century. Sasha Chapman notes in her excellent history of “Kraft Dinner,” as the company’s macaroni and cheese is known in Canada, that while the sauce was likely once just cheese and emulsifying salts, today “one scientist, who asked not to be quoted, estimates that cheese would account for no more than 29 percent of the sauce’s solids.”
Estimating the precise cheese content of an industrial, gold-dusted product is difficult, but we do know that ingredients are listed from most prominent to least. In this regard, both Doritos Nacho Cheese and its reduced-fat variant are cheesier than one might expect. Cheddar cheese is the fifth ingredient on the chips’ current label, followed by whey and another cheese, Romano; the “cheese seasoning” on Cheetos puffs, which are produced by the same parent company, Frito-Lay, lists whey as its leading ingredient, followed by cheddar cheese. No wonder, perhaps, Chester Cheetah, the Cheetos mascot, was once so fond of saying, “It ain’t easy being cheesy.”
