How America Dumbed Down Munster and Then Elevated It Again

If you ask your average American cheese consumer what they think of when they think of Munster cheese, most will recall the square log of rubbery, white, orange "spice"-encrusted deli wonder that melts away faster than the standards of any desperate Tinder voyeur just looking for love. But when the same question is posed to any Frenchie, German, or Swissie, you will hear the details of the pungent-smelling, gooey-centered, smear-rinded wonder that stinks up the fridge and leaves the fingers stained with a scent of moldy yeast that recalls the aroma of a street-ripened Tenderloin hustler.

Before the Euro-Rail made it so easy for backpack-clad American teens to sow some privileged oats and discover the wonders of a world thousands of years ahead of the infantile state of America, most of the population thought of mozzarella as a string cheese found in convenience stores. Provolone was recalled as a massive, circular behemoth that had little more flavor nuance than a mashed sans salt or butter. The rustically beautifully, holey Emmenthaler became known as "Swiss," reminiscent to its inspiration in both aesthetics and pliability.

So how and why did European dairy masterpieces end up chopped at the flavor knees, only to reappear in the mass marketplace as easily consumed inventions primarily slapped on top of a ham and cheese sandwich? Here, we will get into a bit of the sordid past of American agriculture. The US is a melting pot; a truth detailed in countless speeches, most notably by some old white men who probably have some other fetish. But the truth is that we are a country that has taken in so many different cultures, so many different traditions, that once pushed through the food mill of our soil, they warp and transform into something altogether new, and wholly unrecognizable from their inspiration.

When the waves of immigrants crashed upon this land, they brought with them their own agricultural histories. The bread-making and jam-making, legacies of preserving meat and making cheeses: all of this knowledge was in their hearts, tangible as memories still alive on their finger tips. Coming to a land so new and foreign is a scary experience: Have you ever been to a Denny's at dinner time in the Bible Belt? Then you can understand: Being the one that's not like all the others can be scary.

Food has always been a display of comfort and tradition. These new neighbors recalled the cheeses of their lives, but without the small dairy farms of their homelands, the ideas and inspirations got churned into the food industry, stripped of any personality or variability, and re-formed into an easily approachable, incredibly meltable, "dairy" product. Generations passed, and the real cheeses became simply a blip on the lineage's DNA. Now we find ourselves in a moment of rebirth of small farms in this country, and the once-whitewashed creations produced in giant factories along assembly lines and conveyer belts have been turned back to the handmade gifts they once were. While Munster cheese was once only known as a deli cheese, is now being lovingly aged out on pine shelves in little cheese-making huts in the rolling hills of Kentuckiana.

Even as we have the power to appropriate and destroy, so too do we have the power to recreate the traditions of others as our own concepts.

And that, my friends, is a real American story.