Plant cheese
This is an introduction to our ongoing series on plant cheese in which we explore the culinary, scientific, and cultural dimensions of developing plant cheeses that satisfy the same desires as dairy cheeses.
Table of Contents
i. A testament to multispecies relationships and human ingenuity
Cheese appears to be almost as old as agriculture itself, originating in the Fertile Crescent some 9000 years ago; perhaps as soon as sufficient surplus animal milk, and containers in which to store and process it, existed.¹ Those ancient practices have since developed into countless varieties of cheese—a staggering diversity emerging from complex relationships among humans, animals, plants, microbes, and the landscapes that sustain and are animated by them.² And through its own particular form and flavour, each cheese articulates these relationships in its own way.
This diversity makes cheese an eloquent testament to the ways people have figured out how to produce delicious, nutrient-dense food in different environments with different sets of challenges. It is thus exemplary of terroir, being shaped by environmental conditions, nonhuman companions, and human ingenuity that—sometimes explicitly, sometimes tacitly—navigates options within these constraints.
We explore plant cheese as a continuation of that story. And now, that set of constraints is changing. The ecological crisis and other interconnected food systems challenges are profoundly altering relationships between humans, animals, landscapes, markets, and food cultures around the world. Additional forms of ingenuity, like scientific knowledge and current technological innovation, might help us navigate these challenges—but only if they also enrich food culture and respect the role of regionally diverse stewardship of the land. Ecomodernist dogma that ignores the importance of these relationships, seeking to separate people and land, will only exacerbate the problem.
ii. The problem with modern industrial cheese
Today, cheese is symptomatic of the industrialisation of many foods. Go to many supermarkets, and most cheeses are from just a handful of styles, made at an industrial scale by a handful of corporations. Like much of our culinary heritage, cheese has undergone a ‘great simplification’. Its vital ingredient, milk, is even traded as a commodity, like oil.
Industrial cheese produces more GHG emissions on average than chicken and pork.³ To fully grasp its impact, however, we need to escape ‘carbon tunnel vision’, in which all ecological problems are reduced to carbon.⁴ Industrial cheese production degrades the health of watersheds, has a detrimental impact on biodiversity, and is linked to increasing antimicrobial resistance that could trigger future pandemics, all against a backdrop of well-documented ethical problems.⁵
Agroecology points to ways in which dairy can be better. Holistic management, rotational grazing, silvopasture, and keeping calves alongside their mothers are amongst a host of options that show how dairy—when done well—can be part of a more flavourful, equitable and ecological food system.⁶ The reality, however, is that the vast majority of dairy is not produced this way today.
In a hypothetical future in which industrial agriculture was eliminated and replaced with regenerative agroecological methods, it remains an open question whether the carrying capacity of healthy agroecosystems would be high enough to meet the growing demand for milk (and meat), especially when balanced with competing land use demands like urbanisation, biofuels, and ecosystem restoration.
Plant cheese vs dairy cheese:
why argue about ‘either/or’
when we can have ‘both–and’?
We argue that we absolutely can and should maintain animal-based agroecological systems to produce smaller amounts of higher quality dairy cheese (and other animal products) and we should develop new equally delicious plant cheeses using agroecologically produced ingredients to bridge that potential demand gap with low-impact, accessible options. Why argue about ‘either/or’ when we can have ‘both–and’?
How we imagine what that future could look like:
Copenhagen, 2035.
You’re at the cheesemonger, picking something up for a dinner you’re hosting. The selection is overwhelming—delightfully so. Different cheeses made from the milk of rotationally grazed cattle, goats and sheep. The handwritten labels boast of small collectives of farmers proudly honouring regional traditions yet also hint at something new. Different Danish cheeses you’re less familiar with, made from fermented oats, rye and hazelnuts, all ingredients well-adapted to Northern climes. Nice, you wanted something local to delight your friends, who are visiting from overseas. A particularly vibrant blue cheese catches your eye, this one from southern France, made from fermented soy, a variety bred to withstand the now stifling summer temperatures of the Mediterranean. Cheeses from all over, so many shapes and styles, made from all kinds of ingredients. Hearing the phrase “plant-based cheese” nowadays almost seems quaint, like an elderly relative talking about “tape cassettes”. A relic from a bygone era. It’s all just cheese. You remember loving a walnut cheese you tried before, so you’re drawn to that. You notice a selection box available, with different styles all made from plant and animal ingredients grown within a silvopasture system.⁷ Sounds perfect. You think your friends will love it.
iii. Plant cheese that isn’t shit
We know what some of you may be thinking.
Most of the products available on the market are underwhelming, to say the least: ultra-processed foods with an opaque ingredients list as long your arm; poor flavour, texture, and nutritional profile; and unable to replicate many essential properties of dairy cheese, like gooeyness and melt. All the flavour of American sliced cheese without any of its characteristic properties: the worst of both worlds.⁸
These plant-based products have been created to fill a niche in the market, but beyond that are lacking. Sure there might be the odd passable example, and they are getting better—but the selection is still pretty bleak compared to the smorgasbord on offer at even a half-decent cheesemonger. Yet as more people adopt vegetarian, vegan or plant-based diets and/or eat more consciously, there is greater demand for more delicious, more diverse, and more nourishing plant-based products.
The history of plant cheese is older than one might think. Soy-based products marketed as non-dairy cheese have been made in Europe and the USA since the early 1900s.⁹ Fermented tofu has been produced in various forms for almost a thousand years in East Asia.¹⁰ While the latter is not cheese per se, we think it is important to acknowledge long-established precedents for fermenting plant substrates into funky, pungent, rich, savoury, nutrient-dense delicacies, and fermented tofus have many similar sensory characteristics to beloved cheeses. These traditions might also help inspire diverse and flavourful plant cheese innovation.¹¹
The fact remains: truly excellent plant cheese remains elusive. While there are hundreds of start-ups working in the plant dairy space, none has quite yet seemed to crack it.¹²
An approach to plant cheese innovation that draws on dairy cheese’s rich history may offer a way forward. Artisanal producers and monks have been making dairy cheese for thousands of years, joined more recently by industrial producers and some chefs. Using their existing know-how, but translated to plant ingredients, could be a key to creating plant cheeses that faithfully reproduce the desirable attributes of dairy cheeses, and satisfy the same desires.
As with novel translated misos—which are also based on a long cultural lineage but translated for new, locally adapted ingredients—we imagine a future in which plant cheeses are similarly based on traditional, regionally variegated know-how and translated to use locally appropriate plant ingredients grown in healthy agroecosystems. In this future, a range of delicious, regionally distinct cheeses, made from diverse plant and animal ingredients would be available, some with microbial ecologies comparable to their dairy counterparts, and others with novel ones optimal for plant substrates.
iv. Our work
We seek to explore these diverse plant substrates and microbial ecologies, how they interact, and the flavours they generate in the plant-cheese context. We also seek to explore how food innovation of this nature could help to contribute to food culture: what new traditions and types of cheese could arise, and how can we offer them in a way that they add to rather than detract from existing food cultures?
In this series of articles, we will share some of the findings of our culinary and scientific research. We are far from the only people working on plant cheese, and we hope our work can contribute a culinary, flavour-oriented, culturally sensitive approach to this growing field.
Some of the topics we are currently working on (articles will be linked here when finished):
Developing plant cheese prototypes (three so far)
A novel low-temperature coagulation method for plant milk curd
Screening novel enzymes for optimal coagulation of plant milk curds, to create textural properties—like stretchiness, gooeyness, and meltiness—more faithful to dairy cheese
Exploring optimal combinations of plant substrates and cheese styles
Using in-situ microbial production of vitamin B12 to create more nutritionally complete plant-based food
Understanding the microbial communities of plant cheeses that are available on the market, to establish baselines of community composition and diversity
Developing and using a plant curd agar model to facilitate the in-vitro study of plant cheese microbiology, and help the transfer of cheesemaking know-how from dairy cheese to plant cheese production
Using the plant curd agar model to screen for microbes new to the cheese niche that could develop desirable flavours and textures in plant cheese
Experimentally evolving cheese fungi in the plant cheese environment to develop new plant cheese strains, and to study the dynamics of fungal evolution
Developing synthetic ecologies of old and new cheese and plant strains and optimising them for different plant cheese styles
Contributions & acknowledgements
Eliot wrote the article, with contributions and editorial feedback from Josh.
Eliot created the images using the generative AI tool, Midjourney.
Endnotes
[1] Paul Kindstedt (2012), Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization, Chelsea Green, Vermont, USA.
[2] Dan Saladino (2021), Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, Penguin, London, UK.
[3] Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018), ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers’, Science. Averages of course do not tell the full story, and the range of GHG emissions for different cheeses is wide. See ‘On statistics, and how to use them with care’ for further discussion.
[4] Jan Konietzko (2022), ‘Moving beyond carbon tunnel vision with a sustainability data strategy’, Cognizant.
[5] Carlyn Peterson and Frank Mitloehner (2021), ‘Sustainability of the Dairy Industry: Emissions and Mitigation Opportunities’, Frontiers in Animal Science; Alessandro Filazzola et al. (2020), ‘The effects of livestock grazing on biodiversity are mulit-trophic: a meta-analysis’, Ecology Letters; Chetan Sharma et al. (2018), ‘Antimicrobial Resistance: Its Surveillance, Impact, and Alternative Management Strategies in Dairy Animals’, Frontiers in Animal Science; Peter Singer (1975), Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, Harper Collins, New York, USA.
[6] Richard Teague and Urs Kreuter (2020), ‘Managing Grazing to Restore Soil Health, Ecosystem Function, and Ecosystem Services’, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems; Heather Neave et al. (2023), ‘Towards a socially sustainable dairy sector with cow-calf contact systems’, Journal of Dairy Science.
[7] One such speculative example is presented here.
[8] Here we refer to ultra-processed Kraft-single-style ‘cheese’ as described by J. Kenji Lopez Alt, rather than all cheeses produced in the US, of which there are many excellent examples.
[9] Alicia Kennedy (2021), ‘Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It?’, Eater.
[10] Jin Xie and Michael Gänzle (2023), ‘Microbiology of fermented soy foods in Asia: Can we learn lessons for production of plant cheese analogues?’, International Journal of Food Microbiology.
[11] The relation between fermented tofu and plant cheese also links to the perennial question of how to name new food categories. The internet provides some simultaneously valuable and laughable starting points here, including Reddit threads asking ‘are tacos sandwiches?’ and the satisfying rigorous-yet-ridiculous logic of ‘The Sandwich Cube Rule’.
[12] In our opinion at least… The Plant-Based Cheese Landscape v1.2
