natural

I feel like we’re going on a bit of a weird limb if we’re calling cheese a natural food, especially if the yard stick we’re measuring it against is soy and fish sauce

Cheese is, after all, pretty much one of the OG processed foods. Wild cheeses don’t roam the plains to be hunted and slaughtered, it doesn’t grow on cheese trees (treese?) and if your cow is squirting cheese out of its udders, you’ve got a very sick cow. You gotta take a natural product (milk) and go through a whole process to make cheese.

To make cheese like Parmesan, you’re taking milk, inoculating it with bacteria, adding rennet and salt, heating it, separating the curds from the whey, forming it into a shape, and letting it age (I believe in that order, but I’m a foodie, not a cheese maker)

Compared to soy and fish sauce, where at the most basic level the process is basically put soy beans or fish in a container with salt, maybe some water, and let it sit, then strain out the parts that aren’t sauce.

Now of course there’s a lot of different types of cheeses, some have more or less complicated manufacturing processes with different ingredients, and the same goes for soy and fish sauces, there’s a whole lot of grey area where you can argue which ones are more processed or natural than others.

If you were to leave a bucket of milk, and a bucket of fish in some seawater out and forget about them for a few months, you’re probably more likely to have something that resembles fish sauce in the fish bucket than you are to have something resembling parmesan cheese in the milk bucket (though realistically, in either case your probably going to end up with a bucket of smelly sludge and mold in both of them)

And for the record before anyone accuses me of being disingenuous, I’m certain that every bottle of soy or fish sauce you’ve ever seen lists more than 3 ingredients and probably went through at least a few more steps in the manufacturing than I laid out. Fish and soy sauces are more of a broad category, what I described is pretty much the bare minimum you need to do to make something you could reasonably call a fish sauce or a soy sauce. Parmesan cheese is much more specific type of product, if you’re skipping steps or doing things significantly differently, you might be making cheese but you’re not making Parmesan.

It’s kind of weird to think about, but in a certain sense, all three products aren’t actually all that different from each other. You take a base ingredient (milk, beans, or fish) add salt and maybe some other stuff (water, rennet, maybe some other ingredients) and then let bacteria do its thing and wait until it goes so bad it’s good.

Couple recommendations on youtube off the top of my head for anyone curious, I know that Townsends did at least one cheese-making episode, and Tasting History made Garum, which was a type of fish sauce popular in ancient Rome.

And tangentially related, since we mentioned tomatoes, ketchup was basically Europeans’ attempt at making Asian style fish or soy sauces (usually without actually using fish or soy) and it’s only fairly recently that we even settled on tomatoes as being the default ketchup, there were a whole lot of different types of sauces and condiments that used to be called ketchup. Worcestershire sauce, which is actually a fish sauce, is in that same lineage as well. There is a whole lot of weird ketchup history for anyone who really wants to go down that rabbit hole, and I’m pretty sure both of those channels I mentioned have done a couple episodes each that cover at least parts of it.