cheese
Most vegetarians eat cheese without a second thought. Most cheese, the traditional kind, is set with an enzyme from a slaughtered calf. So is cheese vegetarian or not? A genuinely funny mess that ends with two vegetarians at the same shelf reaching for opposite blocks, both right.
cheese
A viral panic says Pfizer secretly makes the enzyme in 90% of your cheese. Pfizer invented it, true, but cashed out thirty years ago, and the patent died not long after. So who owns it now? Follow the trail and it lands somewhere quieter: the global funds, and the foundation behind Ozempic.
cheese
I went looking for cheese set the old way, with calf rennet, and walked into a trap. At the supermarket the traditional enzyme comes with conventional milk, and the clean organic milk comes with the lab one. Which sent me past the rennet entirely, to what's in the milk.
cheese
New Zealand calls itself GE-free. But the enzyme that sets the cheese in nearly every fridge is made by genetically modified microbes, and has been for 25 years, with nothing on the label to say so. It arrived before the GM crops we actually argued about. Here's how, and why.
dairy
I bought a block of Mainland Organic Cheese this week. Then I turned it over and actually read the back. Non-animal rennet, in a certified organic cheese. Is that legit? The answer turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
cheese
Most non-animal rennet in cheese now comes from a handful of global biotech firms — chiefly Novonesis and dsm-firmenich. Here's what fermentation-produced chymosin actually is, how Pfizer first got it approved, and why a process this industrial stays nearly invisible on the label.
