July / august 2006:

Hot discovery: test tube cream cheese



Be careful before you polish off that bagel loaded with cream cheese and lox — you may be destroying important scientific evidence. That delicious, tangy layer in the middle is currently the subject of much investigation.

Cream cheese is something of a scientific mystery. Any food scientist can tell you what happens when an egg cooks, or how to make the perfect pot roast, but cream cheese — that’s a different story altogether. Because cream cheese is a modern invention, despite its often being synonymous with the members of one of the world’s oldest religions, and much of that invention has gone on under closely-guarded corporate conditions. Unlocking its mysteries requires reverse-engineering so that the whole world can understand how that tub of white goodness comes from the inside of a cow.

If they have any luck, the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research — as reported recently by Wired magazine — will soon discover every last thing there is to know about the special Semitic spread. The researchers there, led by Professor John Lucey (who researched yogurt, of all things, in Europe), are whipping up the food industry into a frenzy by unraveling the molecular mysteries of cream cheese. Among the myriad tasks? Reengineering the cheese to better grip bagels. It’s not an intellectual endeavor quite on the level of Talmud study, but it is certainly much tastier.

Speaking of the Talmud, the rabbis there outlawed cheese that isn’t rabbinically-supervised; the rennet used to culture milk comes from the lining of a cow’s udders, and they wanted to make sure those udders were kosher first.

Which leads to an interesting conclusion of modern Judaism and science. You see, cream cheese isn’t really cheese as far as Jews are concerned. It’s not made with a rennet, which produces a denser product like mozzarella, parmesan, or camembert, but rather with an acid (that helps give it the characteristic tang that serves as such a lovely contrast to the sweet caramelization on the bagel’s crust, mixing with the saltiness of the lox to ... well, you know how it tastes). Anyway, the lack of a requirement for rabbinic supervision explains why the dairy aisle is filled with so many, varied, wonderful kosher selections of cream cheese, but so few of the tougher stuff.

So, once science reverse engineers some cream cheese, can it engineer you a great kosher accompaniment of bacon? Indeed, whereas current experimentation hasn’t quite fulfilled the “better, stronger, faster” promises of The Six Million Dollar Man, it’s coming ever closer to replicating the ultimate in slothfulness: artificial pig production’s day is near, and there’s a fair chance that many rabbis will say the pre-fab lab pork is perfectly suited for Jewish consumption. According to many of them, a pig just ain’t a pig if it’s artificially engineered.

So, with cheese that isn’t really cheese, and pork that isn’t really pork, the 21st century is already shaping up as an interesting one for food — both the stereotypically Jewish and the stereotypically not-so-Jewish. Who knows? A kosher bacon cheeseburger may not be so far off after all.


If you'd like to comment on this article, email us a Letter to the Editor.