ALWAYS FOLLOWING THE HEP SIDE OF PROGRESSIVE AMERICAN CULTURE, I’m here today to celebrate Velveeta, Kraft Heinz’s “Pasteurized Recipe Cheese Product.”
Image from Smithsonian Magazine.
My starting point was encountering David Levine’s “The Gooey Goodness of Velveeta Was a Smash Hit From Its Very Cheesy Start,” Smithsonian Magazine, January/February 2025. From there, I left no stone… er… slice/slab/glob unturned: I found Internet sites that both praised and defamed the product. Here are tidbits gleaned from several of them.
Origin. Levine describes, “The year was 1916, and Jacob Weisl, owner of the Monroe Cheese Company of Monroe, New York, had a problem. Some of the wheels of Swiss cheese made in his factory in Pennsylvania inevitably broke or were misshapen, leaving a plethora of bits and blocks of cheese that Weisl was desperate to salvage. He had this waste shipped back to Monroe, where the solution was concocted by one of his cheesemakers, a caseiculture genius named Emil Frey.”
It was Frey, Levine continues, who “devised a new way to mix the cheese pieces with whey, the leftover liquid from milk curds, while adding an ingenious emulsifier to blend the fats and water. (Frey patented a key part of this process.) The result was a cheese that, when melted, became a smooth, velvety sauce. Frey dubbed it Velveeta—and it became an instant hit. By 1923, Weisl had incorporated the Velveeta Cheese Company and was selling his new, sensationally satiny cheese to restaurants and hotels across America and Europe.”
Big Cheese. Levine writes, “Big Cheese soon took over. Kraft Foods bought the Velveeta Company in 1927, and Borden absorbed the Monroe Cheese Company in 1929. Kraft soon changed the Velveeta recipe, though, crucially replacing real cheese, which has only three or four ingredients, with the paragraph of chemical elements that still graces the package today.”
Velveeta Thrives. Levine cites, “In the 1930s and ’40s, Kraft began marketing Velveeta successfully, if rather dubiously, as a health food and diet aid, and its low price and convenience—beloved by kids, shelf-stable, melts like a dream—charmed America’s homemakers throughout the suburban ’60s and beyond. The New York Times in 1976 declared Velveeta a ‘worldwide favorite,’ although no country could vie with the U.S. for sheer consumption: In 1996, domestic sales hit an astonishing peak of 8.75 pounds for every American.”
But Not Without Challenges. In 2002, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told Kraft it could no longer market Velveeta as cheese. Since then, the term “cheese product” seemed to suffice, though technically “cheese” does not.
According to Adrian Miller, author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time, it’s “a processed cheese” containing “cheddar, Colby and Swiss blended together.”
Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time, by Adrian Miller, University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
The 2014 Cheesepocalypse. Michel Martin spoke with Miller about “Velveeta Shortage: Cheesepocalypse?,” NPR, January 15, 2014. MARTIN: “Well, Kraft, which makes Velveeta, does confirm on its Tumblr page that there actually is a shortage. Do we know why they said that was some – that there’s a temporary scarcity?” MILLER: “Seems like it was some kind of manufacturing glitch or something. So I’m not sure. But there’s definitely shortages on the East Coast.”
QUELLE HORROR! It seems that everyone was provisioning for pre-Super Bowl chip dips and found their grocers’ shelves empty of Velveeta! KQED/NPR/PBS reported, “Had The FDA Brought On A Cheese Apocalypse? Probably Not,” June 12, 2014. April Fulton described, “The Food and Drug Administration official who recently suggested that the wooden boards used to age cheese for centuries may be unsafe probably did not expect to start a cheese storm. But she did.”
Cheesemakers, the FDA, even Congress got involved. “So how do you clean a wooden cheese board?,” Fulton asked rhetorically, “The ACS [American Cheese Society] recommends kiln, air and heat drying, and well as santizing with ‘acceptable products.’ ”
With updates fully a year later, The Week analyzed “Only in America: The Horror of the Cheesepocalypse,” January 8, 2015. Samantha Rollins wrote of one “dip season” fan, “If this is true, I’m going to die.”
Some Perspective. Geez. In his interview ten years ago, Adrian Miller said, “I think you can go old-school and use Monterey Jack or cheddar. And you just have to have a creamy element. So you have to have some cream or sour cream or milk. And you just have to play around with it until you get the right consistency. And then the other trick is just to keep it warm.… I know it’s a looming crisis, but I think we can get through it.”
I note, these recommendations were prior to the ascension of RFK Jr. and his brain-worm-addled anti-processing screed.
All in good cultural fun. (Get it? “Cheese culture.”) ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025