No matter how much your tastes have evolved from the time you were eating school lunches,
Velveeta probably has a special place in your list of guilty pleasures.
Despite its unnatural color and questionable texture, there's no denying that magic happens
when you melt it.
Here's a look at the untold truth of Velveeta.
The ultimate leftover
Velveeta wasn't so much discovered as it was invented, and even stranger is the fact that
it's actually the second cheese invented by Swiss immigrant Emil Frey.
In 1889, Frey was tasked by the Monroe Cheese Company with creating a domestic alternative
to the imported cheese called Bismarck, and he came up with a wildly popular spreadable
cheese called Liederkranz.
In 1918, the company went back to him and asked him to solve a new problem.
The company had a lot of Swiss cheese they couldn't sell because the cheese wheels were
damaged, and they didn't just want to throw the leftovers in the trash.
So they challenged Frey to come up with a product that used these cheese scraps.
After some experimentation he came up with a product with such a velvety texture that
they named it Velveeta.
Frankenstein's cheese wheel
So how did Frey invent Velveeta?
Well, the secret is in some weird cheese-based science.
Usually when you melt cheese, the milk proteins in it called caseins don't mix with water,
so they separate into an oily mess.
But Frey had read the research of some Swiss cheese gurus who had success adding sodium
citrate to the cheese to keep that from happening, so he added in some whey and went all Dr.
Frankenstein, engineering what became Velveeta.
Kraft actually describes the genesis of Velveeta as reversing the process that made cheese
in the first place, then stopping at a point before it breaks down completely
Super food?
During the 1930's, the U.S. was caught in the grips of the Great Depression.
With the average family food budget around $9 a week, and millions subsisting on even
less, Americans turned to cost cutting measures.
Milk was expensive, for instance, while Velveeta was not.
And since by 1931 the American Medical Association was hyping Velveeta as a superfood filled
with nutritional goodness, the manufactured cheese's popularity soared as families searched
for cost effective dietary solutions.
Rutgers University even did a study confirming the AMA's belief that Velveeta included everything
needed for "firm flesh."
Of course, nutritional knowledge has changed over the years, and nowadays a one pound brick
of Velveeta looks positively terrifying.
Each block contains 16 servings, and each serving has 80 calories, 6 grams of fat including
4 grams of saturated fat, 3 grams of carbs including 2 grams from sugars, and a whopping
410 milligrams of sodium.
And with all that you're only getting 15% of your daily recommended dose of calcium,
making Velveeta a distinctly guilty pleasure.
Do not try this at home
By the 1940's Velveeta was a national staple, especially once milk and cheddar cheese began
being rationed during World War II.
Kraft decided to help out America's homemakers by publishing a bunch of recipes involving
Velveeta.
The results were… mixed, at best.
As in, weird foods randomly mixed with Velveeta, like a Hawaiian inspired platter that involved
bread, pineapple, peanut butter, Velveeta... and a maraschino cherry?
"I can't believe I ate that whole thing."
That seems downright normal compared to items like the Velveeta jelly omelet or the Velveeta
strata casserole - which is basically bread and Velveeta baked with eggs, milk and more
jelly.
Maybe just stick to nachos next time.
All the President's cheese
One person who loved Kraft's crazy Velveeta recipes was President Lyndon B. Johnson.
During his time in the White House in the 1960's, Johnson frequently hosted down home
style Texas barbecues, complete with Velveeta queso dip.
"When you add liquid gold Velveeta to Ro-tel tomatoes and zesty chilies, you get a queso
so good, you'll blow em away."
In 1976, his widow Lady Bird Johnson contributed the Presidential recipe to a San Antonio cookbook,
and in 2005, the Black Tie & Boots Inaugural Ball, which celebrated fellow Texan George
W. Bush's election to a second term, published a guide to Texas-style hospitality that included
a suggestion of ordering 300 pounds of Velveeta.
Now that's a party!
Velveeta intolerant
It's not easy being lactose-intolerant.
Since dairy is right out, that means cheese is too… but Velveeta isn't technically cheese,
so that should be acceptable, right?
Actually, it turns out the opposite is true.
There are some cheeses that are generally more acceptable for people with lactose intolerance,
such as Camembert and Muenster, which contain less than 2 percent lactose.
Velveeta, on the other hand, contains a whopping 9.3 percent lactose, making it the worst cheese
you can have if you're lactose intolerant.
The new Depression
Even though modern health guides indicate Velveeta is far from the healthy super food
they believed back in the Depression, sales haven't dropped.
In fact, they've soared in recent years, leading to the great cheesepocalypse of 2014, when
Velveeta was suddenly in short supply around the country.
Between 2013 and 2014 alone, sales jumped an incredible 23.7 percent.
The reason?
Unfortunately, it's for the same reason Velveeta became popular in the first place, as Kraft
revealed that most of the sales are coming from discount outlets where increasingly impoverished
families are scrounging for cheaper food.
At least the next Depression will be smothered in velvety melted yumminess.
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