Vegetarians, beware of American cheese!

Many vegetarian cheese-lovers on campus were apparently concerned about whether dining hall cheeses contain rennet—extract of animal stomach membrane used to curdle milk—and posed the question to Harvard’s Food Literacy Project [http://www.dining.harvard.edu/flp/about.html]. In response, HUDS recently reviewed every kind of cheese used in the dining halls, leaving no slice or shred unturned. The verdict? All cheeses are innocent except for one—the sliced American.

From an email sent from Theresa McCulla, the Food Literacy Project administrator:

“We called all our cheese producers and learned that every cheese HUDS serves is FREE of animal-derived rennet (non-animal, microbial enzymes are used instead) EXCEPT for the sliced American cheese. According to Land O' Lakes, the maker of our sliced American cheese, that item is a ‘processed cheese’ which ‘could be made with microbial AND/OR animal-derived flavor-producing enzymes.’ We will look into the possibility of finding an American cheese with only non-animal, microbial enzymes, although by its very nature American cheese is of course a highly processed food.”

Maybe we should all just stop eating American…