[foxyv]

I stopped buying pre-shredded cheese a decade ago. Block cheese is cheaper, lasts longer, and cooks better. Pre-shredded is just worse in every way aside from convenience. Using a cheap rotary grater like they have in restaurants makes this almost a non-issue.

[Animats]

> Block cheese is cheaper, lasts longer, and cooks better.

Is this a promotion for the National Cheese Stockpile?[1] The US has about 1.5 billion pounds of cheese in storage in a cave in Missouri. Really. There's a USDA welfare program for dairy farmers, and they have to put the excess milk somewhere. So it's made into cheese and stored.

[1] https://modernfarmer.com/2022/05/cheese-caves-missouri/

[xp84]

Funny, the same US that is in a stupid trade war where dairy is one of the disputed areas, is doing absurd subsidies of dairy. What an incongruous set of policies.

[foxyv]

You can't really buy "Government Cheese." It used to be given out as part of food assistance programs in the US. I guess it was pretty okay cheese too. I think it's mostly given out as food assistance to other countries now since we moved over to SNAP debit cards.

[tshaddox]

Isn't the convenient version of something always worse in every way aside from convenience than the less convenient version of the same thing?

[xp84]

With the caveat that the ways it's "worse" can easily be irrelevant compared to the convenience.

For instance, I buy way more shredded cheese than blocks. It removes an annoying step that creates a dirty utensil that isn't trivial to clean (grater). If I'm making 3 quesadillas a day for picky children to eat at different snack or mealtimes, I don't want to own 3 shredders, nor to have to carefully scrub the cheese off it 3x per day.

I haven't noticed any important difference in the cheese besides saving me like 15 minutes a day of fussing with cheese graters.

[thaumasiotes]

> If I'm making 3 quesadillas a day for picky children to eat at different snack or mealtimes, I don't want to own 3 shredders

I make quesadillas in the microwave. You don't need to grate the cheese; slicing is just as good.

This assumes you're using corn tortillas; I assume flour tortillas don't microwave well.

[foxyv]

My parents bought pre-grated as well. It's a great option for someone with kids.

However, I would recommend grating a block for a couple days worth at a time and keeping it in the fridge in a food storage container. That way you don't need 3 shredders or to spend all your time cleaning shredders every time you want a quesadilla. An electric rotary shredder or a kitchen-aide attachment makes it trivial.

Also, try adding a little canned Red Enchilada sauce to your quesadilla or egg and cheese burritos. It's life changing!

[thaumasiotes]

> Also, try adding a little canned Red Enchilada sauce to your quesadilla

That's just an enchilada. They're good, but they're not quesadillas.

[foxyv]

A hotdog is a sandwich?

[thaumasiotes]

No, a quesadilla in enchilada sauce is not different from an enchilada in any way, form factor or otherwise. A cheese enchilada is a fried tortilla filled with cheese and coated in enchilada sauce. By the time you've added enchilada sauce to a quesadilla, you've already completed the process of making an enchilada.

[twojacobtwo]

Definitely not "always" and "in every way".

Random example. I buy a meal made by a professional chef and have it delivered. It's more convenient and it's a much better meal than I could make. It's more expensive, sure, but that's not 'in every way'

[lynx97]

That example actually underlines parents point. Because, yes, delivered food is convenient. However, at least in my experience, delivered food from a professional chef is always inferior to what I'd get if I actually visited the same restaurant. Yes, packaging has improved and fried stuff isn't as gross at it used to be, but it is still not the same level of quality compared to actually going there.

[twojacobtwo]

Yeah, if you break it down further into the set of all possible options, but it depends what my criteria/realistic choices are. If I'm not going to or can't leave my house, then the more convenient option is still the better one.

My exception was to the terms "always" and "in every way".

[djtango]

But within the same example its not as good as if you ate the exact same meal freshly served - things won't be as hot and certain textures will be lost in delivery (eg crispy things going soggy)

You mentioned a chef which is less specific but I generally consider restaurant food less healthy than what I'd cook for myself due to differing incentives which is another dimension for convenience

[twojacobtwo]

Indeed, but that's a different choice than the original. If leaving my house isn't an option for me, the subsequent options entailed are then off the table, so to speak. The OP said "always" and "in every way", and I was pointing out that there are many exceptions, depending on many factors.

[Cthulhu_]

I dunno, to be pedantic, cheese is a convenient version of milk. I like both though.

[foxyv]

Restaurants are usually better than home cooking. However, I have rarely found the more convenient option to be cheaper and it is usually worse. It's a bit of an iron triangle. Cheap, convenient, good.

[m463]

anything shelf-stable, hydrogenated peanut butter, highly processed milk, etc

I'm starting to wonder if

  convenience = 1/healthy

hopefully not bananas though.

[josephg]

My partner read a book on food recently. They made an obvious point I’d never thought of before: Food is eaten in our stomachs by bacteria. If the bacteria in our stomachs can’t (or won’t) eat something, that means it’s not digestible. That means it’s not food.

If something is shelf stable, that’s because the bacteria can’t or won’t eat it. If bacteria doesn’t want to eat something, it’s not food. And you probably don’t want it in your stomach.

Some things are shelf stable by physically keeping the bacteria out of it (eg canned food). That seems fine. But how do they make shelf stable cheesy / creamy products? Bacteria loves cheese. They do it with weird additives and substitutes that - by design - bacteria hates. But that also means our bodies can’t really eat it either - since we use the same bacteria in our stomach to digest things.

Plenty of healthy things are convenient. Like, apples! But healthy food is rarely shelf stable. Almost by definition.

[hollerith]

>Food is eaten in our stomachs by bacteria. If the bacteria in our stomachs can’t (or won’t) eat something, that means it’s not digestible.

Both of these are false. Bacteria are not needed for the proper function of the human stomach (or the small intestine). The human body produces digestive enzymes, HCl and bile (and maybe bicarbonate) which combined will digest most foods without any help from bacteria.

Bacteria are needed in the large intestine to convert fiber into short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), but a person can live for many years without any of these SCFAs' being produced in the large intestine, although the person probably would be less healthy.

[josephg]

There’s more and more content these days talking about “the new science of gut bacteria” and talking about how important it is to our health and wellbeing.

Do you think all that is bunk / pseudoscience?

[hollerith]

Gut bacteria in the large intestine are generally considered (including by me) important for human health although again you would not starve to death or die of malnutrition if they all went away because the vast majority of the calories a person in the developed world gets are from foods that bacteria is not needed at all to digest and make use of those calories. Our ancestors 1000s of years ago however probably went through lean periods in which most of their nutrition came from very fibrous plant material with very little starches and free sugars in them, and in that situation, the calories from the SCFAs produced by gut bacteria might have often made the difference between survival and starving to death.

[askvictor]

Generally you're either killing _all_ of the bacteria the sealing the product to prevent new ones entering, or creating an environment that's too hostile for them to live (environments high in salt, sugar, acid, or fat, or low in moisture, all make achieve this)

Also, our stomach is full of acid, the purpose of which is to kill bacteria. Later on, in the intestine, you have a colony of microbes.

Pickled or fermented food is very healthy, and shelf stable. We've been doing that for millenia to preserve food.

It's not as simple as you suggest.

[Xylakant]

But that's not really true. Humans have for thousands of years tried and succeeded to make food not palatable to bacteria. Drying stuff is comparatively simple, but salting, smoking it, by either adding acid or fermenting (which makes the bacteria produce the acid that inhibits them), by adding alcohol (or again, letting the bacteria produce the alcohol), by introducing organisms that produce bactericides - namely fungi (cheese mold) that produce antibiotics. By adding sugar. Honey is shelf stable beyond your wildest dream. There's a lot of ways to get things shelf stable that use natural ingredients only and are - at least in reasonable amounts - perfectly safe to eat.

Your body will do a lot of work on food before it is in the end absorbed. It adds enzymes that break up molecular bonds. It will use acid on it. You will mash it with physical energy. It will be watered down and mixed and in the end, the molecules will be absorbed by your body.

That doesn't mean that you should eat just about everything, that's not true. But I believe making the connection via "bacteria won't eat that, it's not good" doesn't make a good point.

[bc_programming]

We don't digest food exclusively with bacteria. They play a role, of course, but our digestion is done through things with hydrochloric acid and various enzymes produced by the stomach. The bacteria in our stomach is pretty much strains that can both survive the acidic environment and can consume things we cannot digest at all. Various fibers, for example. They help as they consume it and shit out stuff we can digest. Often the things they consume that are indigestible to us are the result of our own breakdown of other compounds; making the process symbiotic.

Also, the environment on a kitchen counter is wildly different than the environment inside out stomach, so airborne bacteria- even if we were to presume these were the exact same kinds of bacteria present in our stomach - being uninterested in foods in the open air doesn't really translate to the idea that the food is indigestible. Many gut bacteria rely on us to break down foods into the things that they can digest, so a colony couldn't start on the surface of the same food(s) in the open air.

[celeritascelery]

I am not very well read on this topic, but it seems like there are other ways to make shelf stable food that doesn’t necessarily make it harder to digest. For example high salt or sugar contents, or removing most of the water. These make it harder for bacteria in the environment but don’t pose a barrier when mixed up in your gut.

Granted, you can’t do that with shredded cheese. which is why it has to be refrigerated and will eventually go bad.

[dwighttk]

>But how do they make shelf stable cheesy / creamy products?

pasteurization and keeping further bacteria out is one way to do it

[Cthulhu_]

Yeah no this is nonsense powdered by pseudoscience and a wrong premise. Food is not eaten in our stomachs by bacteria, please look up some basic biology and consider correcting your post accordingly. At least your incorrect post isn't dangerous per se.

[tabular]

That sounds like an extremely pseudo-scientific book. For the real explanation, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_activity

[tcdent]

bananas are a socioeconomic catastrophe