Oh cheese, you gorgeous, tender treat. There’s nothing I’d rather eat. Creamy, rich, and savory–no wonder it can’t be beat. Delicious on its own or with wine, bread, or meat, cheese makes life complete.
What a beautiful world we live in where this delectable food is one of the healthiest foods you can eat. Cheese is a complete food, containing the essential fat-soluble vitamins of A, D, and K, all the B vitamins, and calcium, phosphorus, zinc, magnesium, and iodine. Even better, the probiotics (beneficial bacteria) in cheese help you absorb all those nutrients.
But not all cheese is created equal. There’s so much variation among the thousands of varieties, from toxic Kraft singles to exquisite artisanal cheeses. Choosing the healthiest options requires a keen eye. Going through each of these steps will ensure you find the healthiest selections.
1. Know What to Look For
The best cheeses are from healthy animals spending plenty of time on the pasture. The pasture and its abundance of grasses, weeds, and other plants perfectly match a ruminant’s diet. Animals living this natural lifestyle make the best milk, which makes the best cheese.
After the milk comes the cheese-making process. The milk is heated, but it should be heated slowly and never be heated above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. This keeps the milk raw and all its beneficial enzymes intact.
Next in the process is adding bacterial cheese cultures and rennet, essential in isolating cheese curds from the milk and helping those curds clump together. The rennet traditionally used is animal rennet from a calf’s forestomach. Nowadays, we have vegetarian or microbial rennet, which is often made with genetically-modified bacteria.
Choose animal rennet over vegetarian rennet when possible. In fact, people sensitive to additives often have issues with vegetarian rennet. But if you’re vegetarian and vegetarian-rennet cheese is the only option, then go for it–it’s better to enjoy cheese and its nourishing qualities than skip out.
2. Check the Label
We want cheese that is:
- Pasture-raised and grass-fed
- Raw
- Made with animal rennet
Some labels will have “grass-fed” and “raw”, which makes identifying the quality of the cheese easier for us. We’ll need to use other methods if it doesn't say either.
The ingredients section can help us find out if the cheese is raw. The first item in the ingredients list will be milk, so check if it says “pasteurized milk ” or “raw milk”. If it says neither, we’ll have the later steps to figure it out.
If it’s not raw, it’s not the end of the world. Cheese made with pasteurized milk is still highly nutritious. Raw cheese just has an edge in its vitamin C and probiotic (beneficial bacteria) levels.
We’ll also find the type of rennet by checking the ingredients. Rennet also goes by “enzymes”, so “vegetable enzymes” is the same as “vegetable rennet”. Don’t worry if the cheese is not made with animal rennet, since it’s hard to find animal-rennet cheese nowadays.
3. What Animal Produced It
If checking the label doesn’t tell us about the animal’s diet, at least the label will tell us what animal produced it, giving clues about what the animal ate. Cows, sheep, goats, and buffaloes are the primary cheese producers, so we’ll focus on these animals.
Sheep are designed to thrive on grass and hay alone and need to consume forage to keep healthy. They are susceptible to a condition called “grain overload” which happens when they ingest a high amount of grain that interferes with their body’s processes. For this reason, sheep are mostly grass-fed.
Goats are meant to digest shrubs, weeds, small tree branches, bark, leaves, and some grasses. Their diet is more varied than sheep and for this reason, they can tolerate more grain. Still, they are susceptible to grain poisoning, making goats mostly grass-fed, but less so than sheep.
The buffalo’s diet consists mainly of grasses, leaves, and other vegetation. Water buffalo are the primary producers of buffalo milk, and as their aquatic name suggests, they also eat a wide assortment of aquatic plants. Buffalo are less susceptible to grain poisoning and therefore can be fed more grain. So, buffalo cheese is not as likely to be purely grass-fed.
Last but not least, we have the cow. They can get all the nutrients they need from grazing a lush pasture of legumes and grasses. But nowadays, a majority of cows live on factory farms and are fed a highly unnatural diet. Some cows have even been bred to tolerate grain better. As a result, cow milk cheese has no guarantee of being grass-fed.
4. Country of Origin
Countries have different standards for milk and cheese production, resulting in differing qualities of cheeses across the world. We’ll look at the top cheese-exporting countries: the EU nations (Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Denmark, etc), the United States, and New Zealand.
New Zealand’s mild weather and vast amounts of arable land encourage farmers to raise animals naturally on pasture. Simply put, confining animals and purchasing feed is simply more expensive than letting the animals find their own food. So if your cheese comes from New Zealand, it is likely of better quality.
In Europe, there are strict food regulations and citizens generally demand higher quality food than American consumers. The EU has taken steps to reduce the prevalence of factory farming and actively protects small-scale artisanal cheese production through laws and regulations, so European cheeses are of higher quality.
Last and indeed least, we have the United States. The country’s mass production of corn and soy makes it more cost-efficient to feed animals unnaturally with grain. The lax food regulations, heavy agricultural industrialization, and prolific factory farming create the lowest-quality cheese. That’s not to say there aren’t first-rate options, but on the whole these options are harder to find.
Be careful in America: they’re allowed to call a cheese raw if it’s been heated to less than 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Whereas, in Europe, cheese heated to 150 degrees Fahrenheit is called thermized. To preserve a milk’s rawness and its heat-sensitive compounds, it must be kept under 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
5. Type of Cheese
Certain types of cheese are protected by the EU, meaning there are laws on how the cheese is made, where it’s made, what kind of milk is used, and so on. For a cheese to be labeled one of these protected cheeses, it must meet all these regulations.
Protected cheeses will have a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) icon. PDO means the food’s origin is geographically delimited, the features of the food are exclusive to that particular place, and all the production phases are in the defined area.
PDO goes by also goes by DOP and DOC (Denominazione di Origine Protetta/Controllata in Italian), and AOP and AOC (Appellation d’Origine Protégée/Contrôlée in French). There is also PDI (Protected Geographical Indication), with the main difference being it is not necessary for all the production phases to be carried out in the geographical area.
If you see any of these labels, you can feel confident about the quality of what you’re buying. And by searching up the name of a protected cheese, you can find the details of how that cheese was made start-to-finish in the Official Journal of the European Union.
Use keywords like “EU”, “European Union”, “single document”, and of course the name of the cheese to find the cheese specifications. Keep fiddling with the combinations until you find the document. Here are a few of my favorite cheeses and how I googled their specifications:
Parmigiano Reggiano: “parmigiano reggiano single document”.
Queso Manchego: “manchego cheese single document eu”.
Pecorino Romano: “pecorino romano eu single document”.
Gouda Holland: “gouda holland european union single document”.
Case Study: Parmigiano Reggiano
You’re in the Costco cheese aisle and see the Kirkland Signature Parmigiano Reggiano. Let’s apply our five steps to evaluate if this is a healthy option.
1. Know what to look for: raw and grass-fed. If you want to be extra, search for animal rennet.
2. Check the label: the label says “Imported from Italy” and “Aged Over 24 Months”, but there’s no mention of raw or grass-fed. Does the ingredient section give us any clues? The ingredients section says “Part-Skimmed Cow’s Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Rennet”. Still nothing about raw or grass-fed.
3. What animal produced it: from the ingredients section, we learned this is a cow’s milk cheese. Unfortunately, the fact it came from a cow doesn’t increase the chance it is grass-fed.
4. Country of origin: the label says it’s from Italy, so that’s a plus. Cheeses from Europe are generally healthier.
5. Type of cheese: the cheese label has the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) label! This means there are EU specifications for how this cheese must be made which will resolve any lingering questions we have.
Searching up this cheese, we find, among other things: the milk cannot undergo any heat treatment and the cows must be fed primarily on fodder produced in the area of origin. Since the milk doesn’t undergo heat treatment, this cheese is raw.
And because the cows are fed locally and the geographic region has lush pastures, the cows are highly likely to be grass-fed. It’s against the regulations to import large amounts of feed, and farmers would almost certainly not grow grain in this geographic region (suited for grasslands) to feed their cows. It’s much more economical to raise the cows on pasture.
As a bonus, the EU specifies the only three ingredients for this cheese are cow’s milk, salt, and calf rennet, meaning this is an animal-rennet cheese.
Case Study: Queso Manchego
We walk to another section of the Costco cheese aisle and see Kirkland Signature Manchego Cheese (if you couldn’t tell, I love Costco for its prices on quality cheeses).
1. Know what to look for: raw and grass-fed, as usual.
2. Check the label: the front label says “100% Sheep’s Milk”, “Aged 6 Months”, and “Product of Spain”. The ingredients section says “Pasteurized Manchega Sheep’s Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Rennet”. We know this cheese is not raw, but not if the cheese is grass-fed.
3. What animal produced it: this cheese came from a sheep, a big plus since sheep are mostly grass-fed.
4. Country of origin: it’s from Spain, so that’s another advantage.
5. Type of cheese: the cheese is protected, so we can search up this cheese’s specification. We find that the milk must come from the Manchega sheep breed, the sheep must graze throughout the year on the natural resources of the area, and production is limited to the La Mancha region.
Going further, we find the La Mancha region is a large, fertile plateau. It stands to reason farmers would let their sheep graze these pastures instead of buying outside feed. We can conclude with high probability this cheese is grass-fed.
Choose Wisely
As you can see, looking at just the label overlooks so many high-quality cheeses. Parmigiano Reggiano’s label doesn’t say anything about being grass-fed or raw, but the cheese is both. Similarly, Manchego’s label doesn’t say grass-fed, but the cheese is just so.
Some of the healthiest cheeses have labels that don’t say anything about their qualities, so we have to dig deeper.
Why don’t cheese labels include grass-fed if they are so? Interestingly, many European cheeses don’t have the “grass-fed” label because it’s not a selling point. People there assume the animals are eating their normal diet. After all, it’s cheaper to feed them off the land than have to buy feed.
Well, what about advertising rawness? Most people don’t know the benefits of raw cheese and don’t look for it, so labels don’t have it.
To be absolutely sure of the quality of the cheese, your best bet is to go to the farm and see how the animals are raised and how the cheese is made. Of course, that’s not the most practical option, so we rely on these methods to get us close.
Choose cheese wisely, and your taste buds and body will thank you for it.