[cheese_goddess]

My mother tongue isn't English either and I live in a corner of the world that has many traditional cheesemakers and a proud cheesemaking culture that goes back centuries if not millenia. Most cheese where I live as in the rest of the world is made with microbial rennet simply because it's cheaper, more available and easier to store and handle.

I'm sorry but I don't believe that 99% (or "the vast majority") of cheese where you live is made with animal rennet. If that's true, please let me know how you know this.

[ornornor]

> how you know this

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empr%C3%A9surage

“ En France, l'utilisation de présure d'origine animale est une des conditions des cahiers des charges pour prétendre aux dénominations de protections fromage fermier, appellation d'origine contrôlée et la marque de l'Union européenne, Label rouge.”

Loosely translated, it means that for a French to cheese to have one of the protected names (Roquefort, Brie de Meaux, Camembert de Normandie, etc) they must use animal rennet. Since farms making these want the protected names because they sell so much better, they use animal rennet.

In the supermarket you can also buy industrial cheese which doesn’t have to use animal rennet. But at the fromagerie they mostly (only?) sell artisanal cheeses, all using animal rennet.

[cheese_goddess]

Yes, that agrees with what I said above: supermarket cheese is the vast majority of cheese that's produced and consumed worldwide, quite unfortunately I might add. PDO cheeses are a minority of all cheeses and only produced in the EU. French PDO cheeses are a minority within a minority, and only produced in France.

Even in EU and even in France, most cheese made and eaten is not PDO and PDO cheeses are made by few and small producers. Camembert de Normandie fermier is famously made by a handful of farmers (five, I think?) and regulators are constantly pressured by the dairy industry to loosen the standards of the PDO, for example to allow pasteurised milk to be used and to allow the "Camembert de Normandie" label to be applied to cheese made in Normandy but with cows other than the race Normande that the traditional producers make it with.

Even in the rest of the EU, outside France, there are bsically two kinds of PDO cheese. There's the kind that are made by few producers in limited amounts and have more stringent requirements like the use of animal rennet, or the use of traditional wooden implements to preserve artisanal bacterial cultures, and that sort of thing, like Camembert de Normandie and Mozzarella di Buffalla Campagna. Or they are made at a larger scale with modern equipment and materials allowed (but not required), of which bacterial rennet is one example, like Manchego or Feta.

The kind of PDO cheeses that must be made with traditional methods, materials and equipments and for which modern alternatives are not allowed are basically artisanal products and again very unfortunately, few and far between, because they tend to be the best cheeses one can have.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I recognise the supermarket cheese that most people eat as inferior quality, and I'm really worried that most people have forgotten what cheese should really be like.