http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/11/19/the-dark-side-of-parmesan-cheese-what-you-dont-know-might-hurt-you/

Most Parmesan Cheeses In America Are Fake, Here's Why

by Larry Olmsted
11/19/2012 @ 7:56AM (73,397 views)

My last column was full of praise for Parmigiano-Reggiano. This great cheese is worthy of all that praise: it is very natural, very healthy, very delicious and very consistent. It is wonderful by itself in chunks, shaved over or grated into foods, cooked or uncooked. It has been so good at doing so many things for so long – over 800 years – that it has earned the nickname in the dairy industry, “The King of Cheeses.”

But there is one big problem. As good as the cheese is, and as famous as it is, you rarely actually get to eat it – even when you think you are. The English translation of the cheese is Parmesan, and when you buy it in England you get Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s the law. The American translation is also Parmesan, but when you buy it here, you could be getting almost anything – except usually Parmigiano-Reggiano.

I noted in my last column that by law, Parmigiano-Reggiano is allowed to contain only three very simple ingredients: milk (produced in the Parma/Reggio region and less than 20 hours from cow to cheese), salt, and rennet (a natural enzyme from calf intestine). Three other ingredients, Cellulose Powder, Potassium Sorbate, and Cheese Cultures are not found in Parmigiano-Reggiano – they are completely illegal in its production. Yet all three are in Kraft 100% Grated Parmesan Cheese (I’m not sure if that means it is supposed to be 100% “parmesan” or simply 100% grated, which it certainly is). It’s far enough from the real thing that Kraft was legally forced to stop selling its cheese labeled Parmesan in Europe.

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Ultimately it is you, the consumer who is the victim. It is not like you are being fed rat poison, but you may well be eating things you didn’t intend to eat and don’t consider healthy. After all, one of the major appeals of Parmigiano-Reggiano is its highly protected purity, plus its high levels of calcium, protein, many other vitamins – it is considered so healthy that is the cheese of choice in space, chosen as an especially good food for astronauts to eat by both the U.S. and Russian space programs. It contains nothing artificial, absolutely no additives and furthermore, the provenance of the milk used to make it is well known: it contains no antibiotics, no steroids and no growth hormones. It is always ultra-fresh for cheesemaking. Even what the cows eat is well documented, with no silage, ever, a diet consisting primarily of vegetation grown in the same carefully delineated Parmigiano-Reggiano region.

When people who care what they put into their bodies eat Parmigiano-Reggiano, they know exactly what they are putting in their bodies. This is often not the case with Parmesan, Parmigiana, Parmesano, or whatever you want to call it from myriad other producers not subject to these regulations. Many have laundry lists of chemicals and additives and even if they list only the same three ingredients, there is no knowing what’s in the milk used, where it came from, how old it is, or how the cheese is actually made. As we are increasingly discovering in the form of a global health epidemic linked heavily to diet, there is a lot of truth to the old saying “You are what you eat.” There is a similar saying attributed to high-level athletes looking for maximum performance: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

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