this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Food is so weird. Bread becomes toxic waste after 8 minutes of being opened, but there's probably some cheese species that gets fermented up the asshole of a mountain llama for 6 months, being stuffed back in after every bowel movement, and is still edible (if you're into that sort of thing) after 400 years of being left in a dank cave amongst the frothing remains of a rotting gerbil cemetery.
Cheese is weird because someone had to be like, well let's go ahead and store some milk in the stomach of an animal, but also they forgot about it under a chair for 3 months and then, upon finding it, thought, "well let's have a go anyway, despite it changing forms." And then eventually someone realized if you stuck it in certain caves it became delicious. So much human history just in that one food product there.
I think one theory is that it was central Asian horse-riding societies who started carrying milk on horseback, in saddlebags made out of animal bladders. The motion of the riding and the rennet left in the bladders churned the milk and turned it into cheese.
I remember also reading on a science magazine's site this possibility that the first cheese made by humans was more of yeast-based preparation, without animal milk, but i can't find the article mentioning that anymore.
Isn't it butter if it's churned?
It is but adding renet causes the milk fat to coagulate. Once that is done 90 degrees abpit the right temp for most cheese. The action of it moving it will cause tue curds to be broken down. The problem with this theory is the whey. Part of cheesemaking is removing the curd from the whey to allow the moisture to be removed. In a sealed vessel it cant go anywhere.