If you’ve ever grabbed that green shaker of parmesan at your favorite Italian restaurant, you might want to rethink your choice. Surprisingly, it’s likely not real parmesan cheese and may not even be cheese at all.
Back in 2012, a surprise inspection by FDA agents at a Pennsylvania cheese factory named Castle Cheese Inc. uncovered something strange. They heard rumors that the factory’s “100% Real Parmesan Cheese,” wasn’t really “100% Real Parmesan Cheese”.
They somehow figured out that the parmesan didn’t have any parmesan cheese at all. It was a blend of cheeses like Swiss and mozzarella, white cheddar and a filler called cellulose. Which is a plant based additive that comes from wood pulp and is also FDA-approved… but only up to 4% of a total product. People have mixed feelings on this understandably.
“How can a product that’s 100% of something be 4% of something else?”
Many of the top brands of grated parmesan cheese got sent to an independent lab for testing after this whole ordeal. A leading seller of hard Italian cheese in the U.S. estimates that about 20% of the grated parmesan products available on shelves are mislabeled to this day.
While the cellulose issue is concerning, the bigger problem is that many products, even the ones without cellulose, still don’t qualify as real parmesan.
True parmesan is known as Parmigiano Reggiano, created more than 900 years ago by monks in northern Italy’s Parma and Reggio Emilia regions. The monks would have a surplus of milk and needed a cheese that could last through the winter without being refrigerated. So they put together a recipe using raw cow’s milk, salt, and rennet. Nothing more, nothing less.
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