Peak Cheese: The Bleak Science of Cheese Depletion

It is an article of faith for some, both on the evangelical right and the secular left, that we live in the end times.  For every millennialist who is reading Nostradamus or prophecies of the end of days in the Bible, there is a secularist waiting for aliens to take their "container" from the Earth, or a Dmitry Orlov prophesying the apocalyptic end of modern culture from the end of our free recourse to oil.  Lost in these more grand hypotheses of abrupt ends to the world we know is a deeper, darker truth with more grounding in science than any of them.  It is this.  With supplies of arable land declining, and the number of dairy cows that can be sustained static or falling, our diets are threatened with chaos.  The science doesn't lie.  The numbers are there.  Dairy wanes, while the planet's gluttony for cheeseburgers and pizzas increases exponentially.  This post tears the roof off of the coming culinary catastrophe our complacent consumption conceals:  Peak Cheese.

The Era of Unlimited Cheese Consumption

The problem is an easy one to see coming, in retrospect.  For centuries, it was the relatively developed civilizations of the West that controlled cheese, and the resources with which to create it.  Britain alone has made over 700 kinds of cheese in its illustrious history. The French have made 400 distinct types of cheese, which are a lot better than some of those crappy British cheeses, with some claiming that figure is closer to 1,000.  Poorer nations under the military and economic boot of the West were nearly cheeseless.  Consider Ethiopia, with its lone (though concededly very tasty) cheese, called ayib.  Mmm, ayib.  While cheese thus was distributed with stark inequality, there was a stable system of cheese production and consumption, which made sustainable for a time the West's voracious consumption of this uniquely tasty snack, sandwich ingredient, and all-purpose complement to any salad or meat.

Yet the expansion of population bases of the West after World War II sent cheese consumption spiraling upward to levels even the West's ample supplies of bucolic meadows would prove unable to sustain.  It was in 1965 that dairy scientists at the University of Wisconsin, led by Professor Werner Oppenbarger, first postulated that the curve representing increasing cheese supply was demonstrably limited by the number of nice, grassy plots in the world.  Oppenbarger's multivariate analysis of cheese production, Cheese Factorials and the Malthusian Dairy Dilemma, was a must-read in the tempestuous academe of the late 1960s.  

A Turn To Alternative Sources of Cheese Amid Increased Demand

But as the world turned hopefully to bell-bottoms and the idealistic music of The Monkees, scientists fueled by an analogous optimism proposed a cultural turn to alternative and renewable cheeses.  Yet these have not proved the answer that many thought in the Sixties when scientists at the University of Wisconsin first postulated the Peak Cheese hypothesis.  While goat cheeses can be fashioned, they are generally recognized as nasty and sharp, and the broader cheese market simply does not respond to their existence unless the consumer is heavily subsidized to purchase them.  Yet goat cheese has fared far better than soy "cheeses," as anyone who has ever suffered through a dinner at a vegan restaurant can attest.  Western civilization has a culinary infrastructure built on cheese, and the masses have thus far been impervious to attempts to wean them from the sweet, fatty mouthfeel of it.

As alt-cheese research has stalled, the rapidly increasing Westernization of Asian food culture has also contributed to Peak Cheese.  Religious mandates in India, as well as the traditionally high-carbohydrate diets in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam have kept cheese consumption low, while the rest of the world drains the limited number of udders that have slaked the West's ever-increasing thirst for consumption of cheese.  Yet the spread of Western culture into east Asia, including in particular the increasing number of McDonalds there, and the number of food-tourism shows filmed by the likes of Anthony Bourdain, have taken their toll.  Cheese consumption in these formerly bucolic, low-cheese economies has leapt upward exponentially.  As Asian nations demand and consume a greater share of an inherently limited amount of the world's fromage, Oppenbarger's bleak forecast has come true:  Peak Cheese.

2011:  The Reality of Peak Cheese

While supplies of cheese inexorably decline in relation to demand with the opening of every new Godfather's Pizza, there is some hope that for at least one further generation, that cheese supplies will be able to sustain our exponentially increasing gluttony.  As End-Cheesers such as Orlov have noted, our Muenster reserves are low, as is the remaining supply of land producing the really tasty, high-grade cheeses such as Parmigiano Reggiano.  Yet these doomsayers do not acknowledge the recent discovery of a new strain of Havarti in upland Denmark, nor can their science explain how Finland now produces what can fairly be called "the world's finest" Swiss cheese -- a claim these delectable tartlets stand foursquare behind!  Mmm, tartlets.

Yet despite these happy diversions, in 2011, there is a growing gap between the world's demand for cheese and discoveries of it.  Western nations have been forced to draw more heavily in their consumption on the fartier cheeses, such as Limburger, Camembert, and occasionally, despite a clear EPA mandate to the contrary, Stilton.  Dangerous episodes of cow-fracking, and the increasing reliance of downmarket economies on "dirty cheeses" such as Velveeta, Cheez-Its, and curdled poutine, are a grim reality worthy of Harlan Ellison's dystopic I Have No Mouth, and I Need Cheese.

So don't be fooled by the continued, momentary availability of nicely wrapped half-pound blocks of cheddar or mozzarella at your local supermarket.  Our gluttony will be our undoing, for, as sources point out, "cheese is quite possibly the most difficult dairy ingredient to replace in cooking or baking."  Our culture, no pun intended, runs on cheese.  So to paraphrase Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, how can you buy cheese in the future, or sell cheese in the future, when there is no market in cheese futures?  You cannot, or course.  Or maybe you can.  Anyhow, I rest my case.