The shifting preference patterns around cheese type are very tangible. In my own case, my kids have never had the kind of individually plastic-wrapped processed orange cheese slices that I grew up with. No Velveeta style either (unless it was on nachos at a fair).
And we mostly buy domestic cheeses, of which there are many suppliers who make higher quality varieties. Tillamook, Cabot come to mind, and one of my favorites, Milton Creamery's Prairie Breeze Cheddar.
Apart from these cheeses being objectively tastier than the cheese of my childhood, the power of social trends is strong, and people across the country have taken on to the "whole" foods trope in the past several years, no doubt urged along by the influence of celebrity chefs and new cuisines that have entered the US via immigration.
Interest in higher quality food is one of things that, despite polarization in other spheres, has become fairly consistent between the coasts and the middle of the country.
Wow you're really passionate about your cheese huh? :) Question - could your parents have afforded real cheese and not the plastic processed stuff? I grew up in Scotland and you could only buy really real cheese, so when I'd go on summer holiday Cheese Whiz was such a treat and I envied anyone who got to eat it regularly.
> Wow you're really passionate about your cheese huh? :)
Living in the Bay Area makes foodies out of people ;) Don't get me started on my sustainable seafood, alt-milk or simulated meat preferences.
> Question - could your parents have afforded real cheese and not the plastic processed stuff?
Absolutely. They were solidly upper middle class. But they were also immigrants from India, a society that doesn't eat as much cheese beyond paneer (though a lot of dairy in other forms) so their first exposure to western style cheese was the dominant American cheese culture of the time, which was Kraft-style slices and powdered Parmesan in a can. They were also super-frugal, so perhaps there is some truth to what you are saying, but really, to this day, they have a very simple mental model of cheese, so they don't know (or care to know) what they are missing.
Admittedly, cheese also formed a smaller portion of our diet - mostly on sandwiches.
> They were also super-frugal, so perhaps there is some truth to what you are saying, but really, to this day, they have a very simple mental model of cheese, so they don't know (or care to know) what they are missing.
I immigrated from India to North America very young (in elementary school), but this was true for me as well, and it took a long time for me to _understand_ cheese and its varieties. I'd expand on that and say that the same held true for bread, jams and jellies, and cured meats as well.
My mental model of cheese was "gummy plastic Kraft slices", and I didn't eat much of those because they didn't provide much in the way of taste. My mental model of bread was "gummy white wonder-bread". My mental model of jams and jellies was some generic bottle of smuckers strawberry. My mental model of cured meats was some oversalted hunk of ham. Mental model of syrup was a bottle of Aunt Jemimah's.
It was a full 15 years of living here before it dawned on me the rich variety of tastes and textures that comprised these foods, and how they could be combined and incorporated into meals. Most of that I owe to eating (out of a sense of obligation) home-made high-quality food prepared by people who had invited me to their homes. Even then, it took a few years until I put two and two together and made the connection that somehow _these people_ were making delicious things out of these foods, and I was somehow not encountering them myself in my own choices.
When I finally burst through to the other side of that, it was a revelation. Cheese was cheddar and jack and gouda and brie and oka and all sorts of other wonderful tastes and textures. Bread was rye and sourdough and pumpernickel and calabrese. Jams were rhubarb and black currant and ginger and marmalade. Cured meats were kolbasa and proscuitto and genoa and soprasatta. Syrups were maple and molasses.
In my childhood days in India, we would sometimes go out and buy exotic "western" food from the store - and this was before India's markets had opened up - so what you were able to obtain were all these singular examples - Wonderbread white, some generic paste of a jam, some processed cheese.
We would eat these and the novelty would hold my interest, but at the back of my mind I felt a bit sorry for those westerners. "This is all they subsist on?" I would wonder.. "how sad".
That implicit bias stayed with me as a child, even after I came over, and influenced my choices in food. Even with all the opportunity to sample a broader range of examples, one must _motivate_ oneself to do so. You have to go out of your way to go to a cheese shop, and try a few, and experiment with them. Why do that when you have already made up your mind that there is nothing more there than what you have already seen?
It was a revelatory event when I finally understood what I was missing, and how I had ended up in that circumstance, and how my biases had guided me into a constrained existence where I had denied myself exposure to these wonderful things.
I take it as a lesson learned, more generally, about prior biases and how they can influence my choices so that I mold my own environment to be blind to things I could otherwise have experienced.
I wonder if someone will ever come up with simulated carbs, without using artificial sweeteners, made from meat & fat. Imagine simulated bread made from 100% chicken.
I assumed that the crust would be more bread-like, but somehow made with some chicken meat. It was more like a flavorless thick circular slice of chicken breast with pizza toppings.
Shrimp pasta (made by making dough out ground up shrimp mixed with transglutamate) was a thing in foodie circles for a while (personally I never tried it).
> Living in the Bay Area makes foodies out of people ;)
Not trying to antagonize here, but mainly wondering if you have a nuanced reason? The consensus is generally that the Bay Area doesn't have very good food, without even adjusting for the cost of living.
57 Michelin starred chefs, and the US's premier wine region, plus lots of cheese/beef/specialty food producers. Also, pretty amazing ethnic food, particularly Mexican and Asian (of all types).
Maybe second to New York for restaurants, but per capita pretty much on top. California is the best produce region of the country, so there are better ingredients within 4 hours of SF than within 4h of NYC. NYC might win for European haute cuisine and for long-established restaurants.
I would argue that Los Angeles might possibly have San Francisco beat, just slightly, but the Michelin Guide hasn’t given stars in LA for over a decade. Still, it’s no where near New York, and per capita, SF is easily top of the list.
LA has gotten a lot better over the past 10y compared to SF's rate of improvement, and is way bigger in population. I think LA has more innovation happening (especially food trucks, weird fusion cuisines, etc.) because you can take risks there.
Portland is great, too, for similar reasons.
All of them (and probably >10 more cities in the US) have world-class food across multiple cuisines.
For any average non-foodie person such as myself, the selection of any major metropolitan city (quality, variety, diversity of ethnic origin) is far more than sufficient.
If you're trying to make some obscure, excessively-specific, metric-based argument based on number of stars and specific obscure cuisines that are missing to satisfy the extreme foodie, that's also trying to be antagonistic, because it's aimed at an exceedingly narrow audience.
I haven't seen better grocery or cheese stores anywhere else in the US, or in Switzerland (there's stores with some better cheeses, but nothing with the range and variety).
I've seen as good or better grocery or cheese shops in Chicago, but as much as I dislike SFBA for variuous reasons, there's no shortage of good (if usually vastly overpriced) restaurants.
Ever been to Berkeley Bowl? I have French family, so I have been there a lot (grew up in Germany, though). French supermarkets are astonishing (especially compared to Germany), but Berkeley Bowl really is something else.
Growing up, it was sometimes hard to know which part of the woods was in France and which in Switzerland. So yes, I have been there, a few hundred times.
You, clearly haven't been to those places I listed or you wouldn't have made that statement (and yes, Berkeley is atypical for the US).
What consensus are you referring to? The Bay Area has fantastic food, many critically-acclaimed restaurants & chefs, and some of the best locally-grown produce and ingredients in the country.
Not saying it's the best; I would certainly rate NYC higher (and with more of long tail cuisine-wise), and would give some other cities a leg up for narrower categories (e.g. LA's Korean food destroys SF easily).
But... "the Bay Area doesn't have very good food"... I'm entirely baffled by that statement.
I think Bay Area is pretty good for US, and as someone said, you get a lot of variety there, but US food is not real good on a world scale. Mostly because of a lack of indigenous cuisine style; almost everything in the US is imitative of some other ethnic cuisine, and the ingredients just ain't gonna match, even if they're comparable in quality (which is rare).
Many of the classic Bay Area foodie places were also super overrated; I always thought Chez Panisse was mediocre, and relatively unknown places nearby (La Limes) were actually better. There were a few real treasures though: I'll miss Aki-san at Sushi Sho.
Interesting, as member of the Great White North (Toronto, Canada), the perception we have here, is that Bay Area has some of the best cuisine in USA. Still from hearsay / general perception, others would be NY City and New Orleans.
More importantly, and again talking stereotypes in the spirit of original post, the image of a young, hip silicon valley operative certainly includes the aura of foodiness
Food in south bay isn’t nearly as good as in SF or east bay (on average), though it is improving rapidly. I think it because South Bay consciously decided to be car-centric, but East Bay and SF decided to focus on public transit.
The latter approach creates more of a critical mass for competitive restaurants. In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of decent little downtown areas that are walkable, and have higher end food, but they’re tiny compared to Berkeley’s gourmet ghetto / downtown, or Downtown Oakland’s Lake Merrit area (and SF blows all that out of the water).
Downtown San Jose may end up eventually being competitive with the rest of the region, but it was a ghost town at night 10 years ago, so it’s still getting bootstrapped.
All of the examples cited in the other responses are decades-old establishments.
Anyway, Silicon Valley has a reputation for expensive, mediocre food, but that’s comparing to SF and East Bay which are both quite good.
Well, whether or not one agrees that it's the best food, I think the Bay Area does have some of the most incredible variety of food in the US, definitely compared to where I grew up in the Midwest.
I moved to the Bay Area from Europe, and it far surpassed my expectations. There is amazing food here. It might not be as easy to get “proper bread” (from a European point), but it’s definitely possible, and the astonishing variety on food in general makes up for it.
Oh yeah, there are places where you can get good bread. The problem is more, as you almost prove the point by recommending me "a place" to get bread, is that good, freshly baked bread is something you expect to get from the bakery at the corner, usually just the closest one, at least in Germany. It's a very mundane thing there.
Overall, I'm very happy with the food options in the Bay Area, though.
>Question - could your parents have afforded real cheese and not the plastic processed stuff?
Not the person you asked but I'm nearly 34 and 'real cheese' wasn't really a thing when I was growing up. You had shredded cheeses, Kraft, Velveeta and maybe up to 4 cheese rolls in the deli counter at the grocery that could be sliced.
Now the non Whole Foods/Trader Joe's grocers are exactly the same with the exception of having small refrigerated sections, away from all the other cheese, with more 'fancy' cheeses at considerably higher costs for relatively small amounts. With several of those 'fancy' cheeses costing 10-20% of my weekly groceries I just don't see myself trying them anytime soon.
I've never seen any of my friends or co-workers eating, or even discussing, 'fancy' cheeses either but I bet you can go to 90% of their houses and find Kraft-style individually wrapped slices and/or a block of Velveeta.
I have the orange wrapped slices in my fridge solely because the children (who have terrible taste) beg for them. For myself I buy better cheese, but it's still a pretty far cry from fancy. We're talking cojack, swiss, provalone, and cheddar slices, shredded cheddar and mozzarella, and the occasional block of pepper jack. Usually from Aldi, but they could easily be found at any discount grocer. I feel like this is a pretty common state of affairs in middle America.
It doesn't help that the markup on real cheese at most stores is extreme. Going to a grocery store with a flat percentage markup over wholesale on everything was pretty eye opening - cheese was much, much cheaper, and milk was actually more expensive.
I'd bet it's correlated to socioeconomic class. Younger, college educated, higher income, urban, and coastal are all probably markers of someone who is willing to spend more for better cheese. But there is quite a gap between Kraft/Velveeta and fancy cheese. I wouldn't say Tillamook or Cabot are fancy, just that they're decent cheese brands.
I also wouldn't classify Kraft slices or Velveeta as cheese, and the FDA doesn't either.
Where I live Tillamook is just the normal run of the mill cheese. Definitely nothing special (though I do think Tillamook ice cream is the best brand my grocery store carries). You have to go to a different area of the store to get the upscale cheeses.
Can't say I've ever even heard of/seen this brand although their product locator shows them at the grocery I shop at, looks like the only thing sold in my state is their shredded cheddar.
>or Cabot are fancy,
Again I've never seen this but my grocery also allegedly has 3 of their products, all 2lb bricks of cheddar. Looks like a store about 20 minutes away has 20 of their products, all cheddar but weird ones like horseradish, hot habanero, port whine spreadable.
Most of the stores seem to have 0-3 of either brand's products.
You'll see a lot of Sargento's 'snack bites' and packs of 11 slices of a few varieties though but every one I've ever tried was not worth the price and was often extremely dry/waxy.
Other than that, and the fancy case, it's some store brand bricks of a few cheddars, store and kraft brand shredded cheeses, Kraft slices and Velveeta.
I had nostalgia for grilled cheese made with individually wrapped slices of cheese from my childhood. We never buy that stuff, but one year for my birthday I told my wife I wanted to have grilled cheese with those kraft slices again. I quickly discovered that my palate has changed in the intervening decades ;-) The kids didn't like it either, fortunately. We threw out what was left of the package.
I grew up on kraft yellow cheese slices as well, my parents could've afforded better cheese however I think its more to the availability (much like the OP states) of better quality items. Grocery stores in America (well big cities at least) have changed massively in the past 30 years, and once you have some decent cheese, you wont buy single slices again.
My parents bought processed cheese because it was all my little brother would eat. I focused my complaining on dyes and sweeteners in order to get the the kind of food I preferred, but really I just like how simple foods taste.
To this day, things that I buy or bring and leave on the shelf will still be there the next time I visit. It's probably a matter of different palates reinforced as culture.
The american processed cheese has it's place. It's on hamburgers. There aren't a lot of cheese that work well for that.
There are a lot of domestic cheeses that are good. You can find nearly every type of cheese being made by at least one cheese maker in Wisconsin. (Distribution is a completely different story)
I find cheddar and pepper jack work as well or better on a homemade burger, but Kraft "cheese" slices are still irreplaceable on one thing, which is the grilled cheese sandwich. The ideal grilled cheese is made with American cheese, mass-produced white bread, and lots of butter.
You can use better ingredients to try to make it fancier, but hit diminishing returns pretty much immediately.
> The ideal grilled cheese is made with American cheese, mass-produced white bread, and lots of butter.
No, it's not. I don't know what he ideal grilled cheese is, but you can get many, much better, grilled cheeses by not using the first two of those items. Lots of butter is spot on, though.
As someone who cooks grilled cheese sandwiches for a family twice a week, and likes to experiment, I can tell you that cheddar or gruyere, mass-produced white bread, and lots of mayonnaise, is preferred by some.
And someone else will chime in with something else. I don't know what the 'ideal' grilled cheese sandwich is, but I'm willing to wager a lot of people think it isn't made with American cheese.
Never tried that. My ideal is bechamel sauce with cheese on top - shredded for the added surface area when browning. This is based on a typical croque monsieur recipe. It's very easy to make bechamel in about 10 minutes and it keeps for a week or more in the fridge without issues.
A glorious combination I stumbled on was smoked mozzarella, sourdough, and a little bit too much butter. Not what I always want, but quite something on a drizzly day.
butter 2 slices of whitebread, place cheddar cheese (doesn't matter the type.. nothing aged) and pan fry. It's just enough to toast the bread and melt the cheese. American cheese will have a weird flavor.
What about brie especially when it's ripe and especially when placed below the burger, Gouda (esp well aged gouda that's room temp or higher and sweating) and pretty much anything made by Sartori work amazingly well on burgers. Goat cheese too.
And cultured butters that are very close to cream consistency, like what Benedikt Dairy makes in New Hampshire (I'm sure there are comparable ones all over the USA?) can be even better.
Agree completely. The flavor of American cheese blends perfectly with pickles, onion, ketchup, and mustard. You can't get that classic cheeseburger flavor without it.
I agree that American "cheese" definitely gives a cheeseburger that classic flavor, but I disagree that there aren't plenty of other cheeses that work on a burger. Cheddar, provolone, gruyere. Hell, even Swiss. It's not the same, obviously, but personally I enjoy it more. YMMV, of course; we're literally talking about personal taste here.
It's all in the timing. And some forethought. The cheese should not be cold when the meat starts to cook. If you can judge the cook of the burger at all, you can judge when to add the cheese: before it's reached the final cook, but after your last flip.
I'm from the UK, but lived in Saudi for a bit and we'd often shop at a local American base where I was introduced to the individually wrapped plastic orange cheese.
I bought a pack of 10 slices out of nostalgia this summer to go on burgers but where no brie, Stilton, etc survived Christmas there are still orange slices of plastic cheese in the fridge. I couldn't manage the whole pack and no one else would touch them!
UK cheese is different from middle of America cheese. I remember being amazed by the cheddar selection at Sainsbury's. Cheap and delicious! Trader Joe's is the only place I've found a crunchy cheddar over here.
Sure, but.. Would you object similarly to my saying that strawberries objectively taste better than poo? Not just 'better to me', but 'really better'. (Of course all food-taste-experiences are tastes experienced by someone, somewhere - are 'subjective' in that way.)
How is there, for example, any such thing as a good/great chef, one being better than another, if it's all just 'subjective'?
It's proverbial that there's no arguing about taste (in the broader sense), but it's also a commonplace that nothing else is worth arguing about. There are better and worse reasons for things.
> Would you object similarly to my saying that strawberries objectively taste better than poo?
Yes.
> How is there, for example, any such thing as a good/great chef, one being better than another, if it's all just 'subjective'?
“good” and “great” are invariably either relative to some specific purpose or subjective.
> It's proverbial that there's no arguing about taste (in the broader sense), but it's also a commonplace that nothing else is worth arguing about.
I disagree with the second half. It's sometimes worth arguing to the point of determining that the source of disagreement is a fundamental difference in taste (or, say, root moral principles, which aren't really that different from a logical point of view.) But once you've reached that point, there is no further use in arguing.
On a side note, I don't even think Kraft singles is considered cheese by the FDA, which is why they have to label it as "Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product."
It turns out there are lots of different labels and designations for 'Process Cheese'.
Pasteurized Process Cheese - Cheese that has been made by melting together a bunch of cheeses (Colby, Cheddar, etc.) and emulsifiers. Singles from decent brands (e.g. Boar's Head) are tasty additions to burgers. Highly desirable meltiness qualities.
Pasteurized Process Cheese Food - Like the above, but less 'cheese' and more 'approved other stuff'. Kraft singles, for example.
Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread - Even less cheese, more moisture and other stuff. Designed for melting into queso, etc. Think Velveeta blocks.
Pasteurized Process American Slices - Definitely not cheese. An oil based product. Meant to mimic the desirable melty qualities of Process Cheese.
You can add sodium citrate to any cheese to make it stay together when melting. In fact you can melt several decent cheeses together, like gruyere and cheddar, add a gram of sodium citrate per ounce of cheese, melt, and pour it on a wax paper lined tray to make your own single slice cheese. For nacho sauce add water or beer to thin it down.
Consider trying other American Process Cheese brands -- e.g. Boar's Head -- that offer the same American Cheese singles, but are of a slightly higher quality.
American cheese on burgers is fantastic, but there's definitely a gradient in the quality of the different American cheese products.
Yeah, after a long stretch of trying "proper" cheeses on burgers, I've gone back to using Kraft singles. Even Kenji Lopez-Alt recommends American cheese for burgers, so I don't feel so bad about it.
I much prefer a mature cheddar. In particular an apple smoked cheddar.
A close second would be a blue cheese such as St. Agur.
Both with a lot of umami goodness on the burger.
I will happily eat a burger with American cheese. It is good - but not cheese to me. It is more an oily softness than the smooth fatty softness from (dare I say real) cheese.
Maybe this comes from growing up where a "cheese shop" actually is a thing :-)
But cheese fries with american cheese are truly sinful and a very guilty pleasure. They're not common around here for which my heart is eternally thankful!
I do both cheddar and blue/gorgonzola on the same burger and it works pretty well. We sometimes add chopped green olives and cream cheese and it makes for an absolutely sublime cheeseburger.
> The shifting preference patterns around cheese type are very tangible.
Yeah, but you still need to compare sandwich cheese to other sandwich cheese. It's not really fair to compare kraft singles with Cypress Grove, a more reasonable comparison would be something like Boar's Head.
It's worse than that; that study only counts things that benefit American producers vis-a-vis Canadian ones. For example, American corn subsidies depress the global price of corn, benefiting both American and Canadian milk producers.
I remember in the late 70's, or early 80's (I was a kid so don't remember exactly), when my grandmother went on Social Security she got cheese and butter regularly from the government. It was actually quality stuff. I believe it was possibly due to what you're talking about.
Yes, they call that "government cheese". I can't speak to the quality but there are people out there that still try to find things that are close to the government cheese quality they loved as kids.
My family had government cheese growing up. Was very very soft, only lightly more dense than cream cheese. Was hard to cut because was too hard for a butter knife but too soft for a carving knife. Taste was like a blander Velveeta. Was not terribly tasty in cold sandwiches but it made THE BEST toasted cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches. Melted very well and tested best melted.
I honestly don't get why all the first world countries of the world don't do more stuff like this. Agriculture is nothing close to a free market anywhere, but its all state involvement behind the scenes before you are presented with what looks like price competition and unbridled capitalism on store shelves.
Except for milk, which stands out as being price regulated in the US. The largest exception I know of.
If taxpayers are going to subsidize farmers to grow tons of excess corn, at least give everyone a cob or two a week instead of using it to dilute gas for no reason.
The kinds of corn fed to cows or used to make all manner of byproduct isn't the sweet corn variety that you'd normally serve alongside dinner. A couple cobs a week of the industrial varieties would be about as useful as getting a couple stalks of wheat; some people could meaningfully use it, but most wouldn't.
We could start stacking it up along the southern border :-) More seriously though it seems to me that we could use with more cheese factories that make "exotic european" cheese, I much prefer a Camembert after dinner than slices of American. The Marin Cheese Factory[1] is a good example, more of those would be nice.
Would definitely be nice to have more local producers. Cowgirl creamery makes some really good cheese, but it's stupidly overpriced, and they could use some more competition.
I was excited to try Marin's Camembert based on the idea of it being a local producer of real French-style cheese, but I've actually been very disappointed in the couple wheels I've tried. Tasted really dull and dry compared to d'Affinois (which is pretty commonly available and pretty reasonably priced) or real French Camembert (which is pungent enough that you should never cut it in a public enclosed space, but I've found it harder to find the good stuff).
Reading between the lines here: the American cheese “product” isn’t very good, and consumer tastes have shifted. Also, I assume the dairy industry is heavily subsidized by the US govnerment?
> Suppliers turn that extra milk into cheese because it is less perishable and stays fresh for longer periods. But Americans are turning their noses up at those processed cheese slices and string cheese — varieties that are a main driver of the U.S. cheese market — in favor of more refined options, Novakovic tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson.
it’s closer to how beer has changed. american mass produced and majority revenue generating cheese is low quality and people have better access to higher quality cheese. so they aren’t buying the traditional money making cheeses as much anymore. of the cheese people are buying now, most of it is american, some of it imported. similar to rise of craft brew. much of the dairy supply chain has been subsidized, previously to ensure availability and lower prices. the same outcome is happening, big cheese makers in the u. s. are branching product lines to have more specialty cheeses or will buy out those small cheese makers. tastes definitely have shifted
Maybe but the article states "Record dairy production in the U.S. has produced a record surplus of cheese causing prices to drop"
So, perhaps there is some of what you say, but it looks like the article is saying it's predominantly due to overproduction. So tastes are changing, and people are shifting their habits but milk (and thus cheese) production have continued to climb.
American cheese is cheap. And when you have an oversupply of milk, you have to either dump it or turn it into something that can be stored for later sale. Thus cheap cheese.
Sorta. Cheese can still go bad (or at least develop a form most people aren't interested in eating).
Part of the problem here is that storing milk as cheese is fine if you assume that in the future there will be less milk/cheese and you'll be able to unload your current stock. This will eventually happen, but along the way you're just going to see a ton of dairy farmers go under and who knows how long it's going to take for the market to stabilize"
Now that sure is an interesting development! However, in cheesemaking, some of the ingredients and byproducts are discarded as part of the process, so you could not recover that for the original milk
Oh, by "American Cheese" they don't just mean cheese made in America, they mean the actual rectangular blocks of processed yellow cheddar-like stuff with mild flavor?
Seems like a waste to just store it as yellow tasteless bricks, can't the industry branch out into more interesting and varied cheeses the people will actually buy?
Some of the best cheese I've ever had was decades ago when there was another cheese surplus and the government was giving it away. My grandparents got some from some senior citizen group, and it was delicious. I remember it being some kind of cheddar cheese. They had more cheese than they could handle -- they had like 4 5 pound blocks of cheese, so they gave most of it to my parents.
Though I was in my teens at the time and prior to that my idea of fine cheese was individually wrapped slices, so I'm not sure what I'd think of it now when I barely consider processed cheese slices to be "cheese".
I remember when the US government distributed cheese to low-income families. It was a good move-- it moved product from farmers, and it fed the hungry.
The cheese was good, too. My family had some.
Perhaps a lot of folks are starting to wake up and go vegan, too, which would contribute to the "cheese surplus" (opting for cashew cheeses and other cruelty-free, delicious options.)
Perhaps some real-world data could support or refute that hypothesis. Though if Veganism is every going to be a proper religion, that sort of rationalism may undermine it.
And we mostly buy domestic cheeses, of which there are many suppliers who make higher quality varieties. Tillamook, Cabot come to mind, and one of my favorites, Milton Creamery's Prairie Breeze Cheddar.
Apart from these cheeses being objectively tastier than the cheese of my childhood, the power of social trends is strong, and people across the country have taken on to the "whole" foods trope in the past several years, no doubt urged along by the influence of celebrity chefs and new cuisines that have entered the US via immigration.
Interest in higher quality food is one of things that, despite polarization in other spheres, has become fairly consistent between the coasts and the middle of the country.