Cheese.

The Final Frontier.

“He who does not eat cheese will go mad,” or so goes a French proverb. For vegetarians, cheese is not just something to slap on a burger. It is the Mecca of food; the shining beacon in the darkness of appetite; the mother, the whore, the benevolent lord and master. “Marooned three years agone," Ben Gunn bemoaned in Treasure Island “… many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese.” Give us cheese or give us death!

But beware, ethically minded eaters. While cheese might tantalize you and haunt your dreams, behind the alluring scent of this crafty vixen is a dame with a complicated past. Yes, when it comes to virtue, cheese can be nefarious indeed. It might not even be vegetarian.

Rennet is cheese’s dirty little secret. It lurks inside all cheese, holding the whole production together. Without rennet, you’ve just got a pail of milk. And what you might not know is that, traditionally, rennet has been developed in the stomach of calves and baby goats. It’s not very pretty. But there’s more. Stomach rennet is just one kind of rennet. Maybe you think that rennet is either vegetarian or cow stomach and that the choice is easy. Maybe you’ve seen ‘rennet’ or ‘enzymes’ on your cheese labels for years and ignored it. The thing is, it’s impossible to know what kind of rennet you’re dealing with simply by looking at the label.

No one wants to pull the veil off a magnificent cheese just to find some baby cow stomach. Don’t despair cheese-lovers — rennet isn’t simply bad, but it does require further examination.

Microbial Rennet

Cypress Grove is a Northern California-based company that makes a line of pretty darn tasty goat-milk cheeses. Midnight Moon, a smooth, hard-aged cheese is a particular favorite, along with the soft-surface ripened Humboldt Fog and the newish Truffle Tremor (which is sort of like the Humboldt Fog with bits of truffle in it). The Cypress Grove website shows pictures of contented baby goats and local Humboldt County dairy farmers alongside their cheeses. This is no Kraft manufacturing plant, the pictures say. Our cheeses are made with family, community, nature.

What may surprise you about Cypress Grove cheeses is that they — along with most of the world’s cheese—are coagulated with a rennet called Fermentation Produced Chymosin (FPC). Let me explain. Back in the late 1980s, scientists developed something called “microbial rennet” in response to a shortage of traditional animal rennet. The original microbial rennets are yeast, fungus, or mold organisms that are grown and fermented in a lab. At first, they seemed like a great solution to the scarcity and high cost of animal-based enzymes. But microbial rennet has its drawbacks — namely, people think it makes cheese taste kind of bitter.  The longer the microbial cheese ages, the more bitter it gets. Then, in 1990, FPC came onto the scene. It’s like the original microbial rennet but with a special twist: FPC is genetically modified calf-rennet expressed into bacteria. In other words, it takes the genetic material from the calf stomach needed to coagulate milk (called chymosin) and then cultures it to produce commercial quantities of what is still referred to as microbial rennet. When you see the word “microbial” on your package, chances are, this is what you’re getting.

FPC is a cheap, easy-to-produce cheese coagulant that doesn’t negatively affect the taste of your cheese. This is why industrial cheese companies like Kraft and Sargento have embraced them, and why smaller, self-described “artisanal” cheesemakers like Cypress Grove have as well. They can all say they are pleasing their vegetarian (and Kosher) public while being able to produce more cheese for less money. Everybody wins.

Some vegetarians say that because FPC depended initially on using a calf to extract the gene, it cannot be considered vegetarian. But let’s face reality: Cloned organisms like this are so far from their original source they can’t even be considered natural. GM chymosin is an alternative to slaughtering animals for cheese production. And like it or not, it’s everywhere. For vegetarians who don’t mind a little Frankenfood, FPC could solve their rennet woes.

Animal Rennet

Long ago, in a land far away, people carried their milk in sacks made of goat stomachs. As the story goes, these ancient peoples found that milk left in the sacks too long separated into solid and liquid. The enzymes in the stomach lining broke down the milk into curds and whey. Like many cultivated foods we now take for granted, the invention of cheese was an accident, so the story goes.

Procuring baby cow and goat stomachs ain’t what it used to be, what with a decrease in the demand for veal and the cost of production for a new, cheese-curious Asian market. Once the cheese-loving vegetarian’s main worry, it’s now more difficult to find a cheese made with genuinely traditional, calf’s stomach rennet than one without, at least in the U.S. Giant evil cheese plants prefer the vegetarian-friendly FPC rennets because they produce more cheese for their buck. These days, it’s small artisanal cheesemakers who are reviving older techniques. They are proving to be the most vociferous promoters of good-old stomach-lining rennet.

“It’s a beautiful farm,” the cheesemonger at Bedford Cheese Shop told me, “and one of my favorite cheeses.” She was referring to the Uplands Cheese Company in Dodgeville, Wisconsin which describes its Pleasant Ridge Reserve as “an artisanal cheese made from the non-pasteurized milk of a single herd of Wisconsin cows fed and managed using natural, ‘old world’ practices.” No doubt, these people are serious about tradition. They make cheese seasonally, allowing their cows to graze on fresh grasses and wildflowers. After selecting the best milk from their cows, “traditional cultures and enzymes” are added to “yield a cheese that responds to the affinage process with a deep and complex flavor profile.”

Pleasant Ridge Reserve is a damn good cheese. And the Uplands Cheese Company seems to treat their animals well. For those looking for handcrafted artisanal cheese this is a good choice. Unfortunately, as small cheesemakers turn away from industrial practices, they are producing cheese that still depends upon the slaughtering of animals. More natural? Perhaps. More ethical? Perhaps not. But definitely not vegetarian.

Vegetable Rennet

By now you’re probably getting wise that when you see “vegetarian rennet” on a label, you’re generally dealing with a rennet that has spent more time inside a Petri dish than a farm. True vegetable rennets do exist, though, and can account for some really wonderful cheeses. Thistle is perhaps the most commonly used vegetable coagulant and some of the best cardoon thistle-rennet cheeses come from Spain and Portugal, such as the creamy Queijo Serra da Estrela from the high Serra da Estrela mountain range. Stinging nettles are a bitch to walk into on your nature hike, but they make excellent coagulants and are high in vitamins, iron, and calcium.

I won’t say that cheeses made with vegetable rennets are indistinguishable from other cheeses. They don’t seem to work as well in Italian cheeses and thistle in particular seems to work better in sheep’s milk cheeses like those above than in cow’s milk cheeses. Some don’t prefer the earthy taste of thistle, fig bark, sorrel and nettle but the best use these flavors to their advantage. As for tradition, the ancient Romans, masters of cheese production, used plant-based coagulants all the time for their cheese, fig bark and thistle flowers among them. Those mired in tradition may choose to experiment with these methods and still rest assured of their authenticity.

Acid-precipated Cheese

Before you run for the Rolaids, allow me to explain. Simple ingredients like lemon, vinegar, and citric acid are all it takes to make fresh, homemade cheese that is delicious. For paneer, just heat up some milk, add lemon juice, and squeeze. For queso blanco, repeat the same process with vinegar. What I love most about these fresh farmer’s cheeses is that they really take the mystery out of cheesemaking. And a cheese that has the approval stamp of a billion Indians can’t be that wrong.

Of course, this process is admittedly limited. For some, cheese just isn’t cheese unless it’s been sitting around in some dark cave like Golem, getting stinky and old and dried up. Still, you don’t have to worry about that pesky stomach lining or cloned DNA lurking around your plate.

Vegan Cheese

This wouldn’t be a fair analysis if I didn’t allow vegan cheese a proper say. Oh, vegan cheese, how you promise and disappoint. Where technology has given us juicy bits of gluten that can easily substitute for duck slices and chicken nuggets, vegan cheese may be the great disappointment of techno-progress. It doesn’t melt, it doesn’t fry. It tastes like Silly Putty but it isn’t as funny. Shockingly, as most veggie cheeses contain casein, a milk derivative, they are not even vegan. If you are lactose intolerant and grew up on Velveeta, you may be able to tolerate Galaxy brand Veggie Slices, which are quite widely available. I wouldn’t wish Vegan Gourmet Cheddar on Hitler. How I wish that PETA would sponsor an X PRIZE for an even vaguely edible fake cheese.

Milk

Just as we discuss the finer points of rennet, there is something more important to keep in mind. Cheese is not mostly enzyme, but mostly dairy. Vegetarians, Orthodox Jews, authentic people — all are doing their ethics a great disservice when they focus solely on animal death. Animal suffering is also a factor. Sure, I’m willing to say that FCP is vegetarian. But I don’t even want to think about the dairy factory that Kraft cheese comes from. And while I personally think that animal rennet has long been proven itself anachronistic, it pales when compared to the medieval cruelties of the industrial dairy complex. Likewise, though small farm-produced cheesemakers will often treat their animals much more humanely, the word “artisanal” can be misleading. Artisans may be the creators of your cheese; they are not necessarily the producers of the milk. Just as you don’t need an orange grove to make fresh-squeezed juice, you don’t need to own a cow to make your own cheese.

Anyway, the answer is what you've already heard from a million hippies, or Michael Pollan. With better labeling we could all become more informed consumers and have our ethics better match our tastes. So write your congressman or take to the streets, or something. Let the cheese information revolution begin now.

Stefany Anne Golberg is an artist, writer, musician, and professional dilettante. She's a founding member of the art collective Flux Factory and lives in New York City. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Lemon photograph by ^Vanessa^ via Flickr (Creative Commons), Thistle photograph by Grant MacDonald via Flickr (Creative Commons), Cheese photograph by foodmuse via Flickr (Creative Commons), “Veg-o-matic” photograph by Eric Tucker/Getty Images; "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images