Complex Numbers

This Is the Whey

Sometimes I'll hear about science that seems nearly useless, like, I don't know, the effectiveness of positive reinforcement whilst teaching pigs how to sing. But every so often, a study comes out that truly pushes the limits of human knowledge and has a profound effect on our everyday lives. Like this one, from a two-year-old article in Smithsonian:

    What Makes Cheddar Cheese Taste So Good?  
After a year-long cheddar-making experiment, scientists have unraveled the microbial underpinnings of the cheese’s buttery flavor

And here I was, thinking that the buttery flavor of cheese is because it's made from the same stuff as butter. Another point against "common sense."

Eating cheese, for many, is one of life’s great pleasures.

Yep, it's right up there with eating good bread. And there are few greater pleasures than doing both at the same time. Gods, I miss France.

And while cheese-makers and scientists have long understood that bacteria transforms milk into the creamy, flavor-packed product, they haven’t fully understood the roles different microorganisms play in developing the unique flavors of cheeses.

Now, researchers are one step closer to unraveling some of this delicious mystery for cheddar.

While the US just doesn't have the cheese culture that France does, or even the UK, cheddar (a cheese of British origin) is quite popular here and, from what I understand, pretty much everywhere.

Cheese is a fermented food—just like beer, kombucha, kimchi and yogurt, to name a few.

While I appreciate beer being categorized under "food" there, I don't think "just like" is the proper description.

To produce it, cheese-makers add bacteria to milk. The bacteria chow down on the sugars present in the milk, transforming them into lactic acid—which helps give cheese (and other foods, like sourdough bread) its tangy taste.

For one thing, yeast is an entirely different microorganism to bacteria. They're not even in the same kingdom; yeast is a eukaryote.

To better understand what’s happening at the microbial level, researchers set up a cheddar-making experiment.

This. This is what science is for.

The article goes into how the experiment worked, then:

Though past research has explored the roles of individual microorganisms, the paper “brings together the bacterial communication that are at play in the complex metabolic landscape that leads to the overall cheese flavor profiles,” says Bart Weimer...

On a more serious note, this sort of thing really is different from a lot of science, which tends to work by isolating variables. This research combines variables, and acknowledges that cheese, like life, isn't all about the effect of one factor, but rather about the interplay between different factors.

And look, I made it all the way through the article without making a cheesy pun. Well, except for the entry title.