Climax Blue

May 10, 2024 12:39 PM

Context: Cheese Award Controversy. Cheese Professor: “In the US food-selling world, there is a term called Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS). For our store, and most natural foods stores, buyers won’t buy foods with ingredients that are not GRAS I looked at the Climax Blue ingredient list and there was something I didn’t recognize: kokum butter. I looked it up and, while approved for cosmetics and for one specific confection, it was not on the GRAS list. So we rejected it.” Elsewhere: Reddit, Plant based News, AgFunderNews.
posted by Wordshore (42 comments total)

He's right about one thing: vegan cheeze is definitely better than it used to be. A problem is that the really good stuff that mimics dairy cheese pretty well can be eyewateringly spendy.

Anyway, my two cents. I can't wait for the influx of posters who use this story to be contemptuous and dismissive of vegan producers even trying to make good stuff or bring out their axe to grind against vegans.*





*I used to be a combative vegan (apologies for that!) now I'm just a vegan who is fascinated about all the stuff I now have access to
posted by Kitteh at 12:46 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]

Nut-milk-based cheese was a total game-changer over the soy-based kind.

It would be a great time to be a vegan, except that so many people are jerky about it.
posted by box at 12:52 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Jerky made of people is definitely not vegan.
posted by Daily Alice at 12:55 PM on May 10 [32 favorites]

The very notion of “vegan cheese” upsets a lot of people.
Anyone who has a problem with vegan anything (or anyone) needs to reevaluate certain aspects of their life.
posted by pracowity at 1:00 PM on May 10 [21 favorites]

The very notion of “vegan cheese” upsets a lot of people.

Yeah and so does putting beans in chili. I bet hundreds of years ago you could find people who were upset that New World foods like tomatoes and peppers were being used in "authentic" Italian or Indian food or whatever. People are so fucking exhausting. Eat your cheese and shut the fuck up.
posted by saladin at 1:04 PM on May 10 [23 favorites]

A lot of axes being ground here and very little information about what the heck kokum butter (the offending ingredient supposedly) actually is.

Maybe I'm naive but shouldn't figuring out if it's safe to eat be both a high priority and relatively easy? I'm assuming some level of annoying FDA bureaucracy but even so...
posted by Wretch729 at 1:05 PM on May 10 [4 favorites]

The increased scrutiny of the ingredients in the cheese may or may not have had some nefarious motivation, but using obscure ingredients not certified as safe is just begging for another Daily Harvest Lentil Crumbles Incident (more about the GRAS status of tara flour).

I'm not a vegan, but I like cooking and have vegan and vegetarian friends, so I find direct and indirect meat and dairy substitutes very interesting -- but I also have concerns about how heavily processed some of these facsimiles are.

The last time I tried a vegan cheese, it was, to put it politely, not good. So I was intrigued to read about this one, until I got to this (from two of TFAs):

Climax’s blue cheese is cultured and aged; where it really diverges – apart from the lack of cows – is that it uses “machine learning frameworks” to “optimize” its plant-based ingredients.

According to Zahn, who uses AI and machine learning to develop recipes and processes...

I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong with plugging the spicy predictive text directly into the food production pipeline. BRB; off to scream forever into the void.
posted by confluency at 1:06 PM on May 10 [36 favorites]

The notes from the Cheese Professor were interesting and reflect thoughts I've had about meat substitutes as well. I'm not sure why so many people think Climax should get a free pass for using food ingredients that are not generally recognized as safe (even if it is used in cosmetics). There are a lot of things used in cosmetics that aren't edible.

The Wikipedia article on the plant and kokum oil don't mention any culinary uses for the oil, either.
posted by caphector at 1:09 PM on May 10 [4 favorites]

I would just like to shout out the fact that the author of this article, whose name is Gordon, has a blog about his life as a cheese expert and that blog is named Gordonzola and that is pun so gouda that you all need to stop and appreciate it, after which you can go back to arguing about whatever this article is actually about.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:09 PM on May 10 [63 favorites]

The list of substances in the GRAS list is quite extensive. It's definitely worth browsing if you have some spare time, and you'll never look at a list of ingredients the same way again.
posted by tommasz at 1:18 PM on May 10

It looks like Kokum butter is a seed fat from the kokim tree and that most of it's applications are around skin care.

On the GRAS side of things - it's absolutely true that there are a lot of people moving into food/drink industry over the last 15 years or so who have a minimal understanding of what all this means. See it all the time in the beer industry with people throwing exotic ingredients into the beer that no one has a clue if they're safe or not. If your beer goes for label approval with the TTB (basically if it leaves your doorstep in most states), then it's required to have a submitted formulary and lord help you if one of the ingredients isn't in the GRAS list for beverage usage. You're in for a battle (more so back when Kent Battle Martin was the only TTB approver for beer labels)

Add in the "we want venture capital funding" use of buzzwords and it's ripe for abuse.

(Incidentally, I'm seeing the same thing in the beer world with NA beverages. I don't trust the average/above-average craft beer brewery to understand and practice food safety well enough to make a safe NA product)
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:23 PM on May 10 [4 favorites]

Gordonzola is the best. He's a pillar of San Francisco culture (pun intended), and a really nice guy.
posted by ntk at 1:27 PM on May 10 [8 favorites]

Metafilter: Eat your cheese and shut the fuck up.
posted by Foosnark at 1:31 PM on May 10 [14 favorites]

I read TFA and thought it a good story, and also it is an occasion for me to mourn the absence of one who would have found the notion of a Cheese Award Contretemps enormously amusing.

One thing that I did not note in TFA or the thread, is the food industry appropriation of a word when we allow the use of "cheese" to describe these complex gastronomic concoctions, which might be good food (eventually, sometimes) but which are not really cheese. Take a look at what the rules say about what "roast" has to mean in "roast beef." Were it not for a burst of consumer activism back in the mid-200x time, "chocolate" would now mean something quite different from its historical sense of "mixture of cocoa solids, cocoa butter, sugar, emulsifier and (optional) flavorant."

There are good reasons for regulating what business enterprises can name their food products, and the beating that the word "cheese" has to take seems pretty extreme in this case.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:57 PM on May 10 [8 favorites]

I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong with plugging the spicy predictive text directly into the food production pipeline. BRB; off to scream forever into the void.

Honestly, the thing that drives me nuts the most about the current LLM / spicy autocomplete fad is that it has completely coopted the term "AI," even when people try to qualify it with "generative AI."

I mean, "artifical intelligence" is already so broad that it barely has any meaning beyond "silicon is involved," but to say "I'm using AI for food production" probably is more about predicting flavor and texture from different ratios of substances without having to try thousands of variations directly.

Five years ago my gut reaction to this would have been "neat" rather than "ick", and that's another L to lay at the feet of Sam Altman and his ilk.
posted by thecaddy at 2:01 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

I found it amusing that when I was writing my post the spelling correction recommended for "kokum" was "hokum", which I found amusingly apropos.
posted by caphector at 2:04 PM on May 10 [6 favorites]

Gordonzola is an excellent cheese writer.

I can't find it online, but at least in his book he has a terrifying "black swan" story about how pasteurization is good for food safety, but that depends on how often your workers get drunk on the weekend and use the cheesemaking vats as impromptu hot tubs for the new friends they met at the bar. (Page 71 in Cheesemonger: A Life on the wedge)
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 2:04 PM on May 10 [7 favorites]

There are good reasons for regulating what business enterprises can name their food products, and the beating that the word "cheese" has to take seems pretty extreme in this case.

We keep running into this across all the vegan substitutes: mayonnaise, milk, and now cheese. I think it's weird not to use the term that it's replicating, so that we wind up with vegan spread, oat drink and ... I dunno, cultured protein product? I think appending "vegan" is enough of a differentiator that it marks it as a separate category.

Is vegan cheese "cheese"? No. Is it a "cheese product"? Also no. Is it "vegan cheese"? Yes.

Is tofu a "vegan cheese"? Results hazy, ask again later.
posted by thecaddy at 2:10 PM on May 10 [14 favorites]

I always thought Daiya vegan cheese was fine, and their cheesecake is really good, and I just noticed on the package that Jello has online recipes for using non-diary milk to make pudding. Right on.

I'm not a vegan, but lots of vegan food is just fine, and I'm now old enough to not care if it's mimicking non-vegan food.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:28 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]

I love this article and it reminds me why I came to MF in the first place.
posted by ludflu at 2:51 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

I would just like to shout out the fact that the author of this article, whose name is Gordon

Sometimes, I dream about cheese . . .

(As a vegan, this is almost literally true. Giving up cheese has been much, much harder than giving up meat. There are some good-ish vegan substitutes these days, but they're not ubiquitous like, say, Impossible burgers, and they don't cover the full spectrum of cheesy tastes.)
posted by nosewings at 2:59 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

By the way - if you can find that Rogue River Blue that he mentions (and aren't vegan - cheese would make that transition near impossible for me) - holy smokes is that good. Even better they have one that's smoked over hazelnut shells and that is a marvelous pairing with some bread and beer.
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:14 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Am I the only one who saw “kokum butter” and my mind went right to this? Nummy Muffin CooCol Butter

Apologies for the derail. Back to the cheese discussion…
posted by gmatom at 3:16 PM on May 10

My Mom has been through all of the health fads, and I've been subjected to a barrage of "stop the FDA from clamping down on our freedoms" whines over the years, and, yeah: I'm actually kinda shocked that the worst we've seen from the heavily processed "health food" sector is stuff like tara flour, the overuse of partially hydrogenated fats, and and the excess of heavy metals in protein powders, and not a disaster at the level of the tocopherol acetate vaping fiasco.

(Though I guess the contaminated tryptophan leading to eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome situation in '89 was of that scale.)

But I'm pretty sure more is coming.
posted by straw at 3:51 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]

Thought of the WaPo article on the cheese controversy, it's in here.

My considered opinion, as someone who goes back to the days of nasty, crimped chubs of vegan cheese-substitutes that stuck like rubber cement to the shelves, is that the vegan “cheese” is clearly getting better. Once, its aspirations only reached as far as Kraft Singles or other processed cheese which had already been dumbed-down in flavor by big dairy companies who are not blameless here. Now it tries, and sometimes achieves, integrity as food.

"integrity as food" stuck out to me.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:04 PM on May 10

By the way - if you can find that Rogue River Blue that he mentions (and aren't vegan - cheese would make that transition near impossible for me) - holy smokes is that good.

Quoted for truth. It’s stunningly good, a creamy, mild blue that’s surprisingly sweet. It’s aged in Syrah leaves which have been soaked in pear liqueur. It costs $265 a kilo here and it’s absolutely worth it.

As a keen amateur cheesemaker this is interesting stuff. I was on Reddit recently and someone asked about vegan blue cheese and instantly got a heap of dismissive replies. Why can’t everyone have fatty salty protein?
posted by the duck by the oboe at 4:09 PM on May 10 [5 favorites]

I haven't tried the Rogue River Blue, but I have had pretty much every cheese made by Rind NYC, and I have to say, they have some that I've served at dinner parties for vegan guests, and the non-vegan, non-vegetarian guests ended up devouring it, thinking it was "real" cheese.

Now, if I could only convince my local shops to sell it so I don't have to order it online.
posted by yellowcandy at 5:16 PM on May 10

There are good reasons for regulating what business enterprises can name their food products, and the beating that the word "cheese" has to take seems pretty extreme in this case.

When restricting what can or can't be called X is done to protect the consumer, sure, it's a fine thing. I don't want pharmacies selling over-the-counter Pen-a-Sillin all-natural bacteria deterrent to unwitting consumers when it has nothing to do with actual penicillin.

But protecting the consumer is not why industries push against calling something almond milk or vegan cheese or whatever. The industries want to keep those valuable descriptors to themselves and force their competition to use less useful words. When someone buys almond milk, I don't think they're fooled into thinking they're buying, I don't know, milk from cows fed strictly on almonds. They know it's some sort of liquefied almonds in a milk-like form. It says so on the carton in language the customer can understand. And customers know that vegan cheese means the product may resemble animal-derived cheese, but that it doesn't have animal-derived ingredients, nothing sucked from an animal's tit. The producers use the word "cheese" like you might use the word "sandwich" or "burger" to describe the general form of the product, not to fool customers into thinking they're getting an animal product.
posted by pracowity at 5:44 PM on May 10 [8 favorites]

Also, this is a very good point:

There is an aspect of new food technology companies that we don’t talk a lot about much. Not speaking of any one company here, but many of the venture capital-backed companies involved in tech food do not really have food production experience. They don’t know the practices of integrity in the food world, or how to package and label it correctly (“Yes, if your product says 4 oz. it needs to actually weigh 4 oz.”).
posted by the duck by the oboe at 6:29 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Yes, cheese and eggs, why I can't be a vegan. OK, also brisket, and turkey, and chicken, but I digress.

Thought it was shitty that they were going to win and then got yanked. Didn't know they had non GRAS stuff in there.
posted by Windopaene at 7:58 PM on May 10

but many of the venture capital-backed companies involved in tech food do not really have food production experience. They don’t know the practices of integrity in the food world, or how to package and label it correctly

Such as when a number of people got sick eating Soylent bars which were apparently contaminated with blue green algae back in 2016.
posted by jamjam at 8:47 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]

My first thought was: Climax Blue’s Banned

I suspect there are limits beyond which consumer confusion sets in, but almond milk and vegan cheese are almost certainly within that limit. Though there’s creep to all these things — how long before we start seeing “vegan style*” cheese?

*contains dairy
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 9:01 PM on May 10

For those who are curious, the OED mentions that nondairy uses of the word “cheese” have been in use since the 16th Century. For instance, everyone’s favorite: “head cheese”. Which is neither heads nor cheese. Discuss.
posted by q*ben at 9:24 PM on May 10 [7 favorites]

But protecting the consumer is not why industries push against calling something almond milk or vegan cheese or whatever. The industries want to keep those valuable descriptors to themselves and force their competition to use less useful words.

So much this. ‘Almond milk’ has been used in English for 640 years.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 12:21 AM on May 11 [6 favorites]

I looked around a bit, and apparently kokum oil is a permitted vegetable fat in the EU Chocolate Directive, at page 7: linky. If "European chocolate" is the "one specific confection" in the article then I think it's being a wee bit disingenuous.
posted by 1adam12 at 2:15 AM on May 11

Why can’t everyone have fatty salty protein?

From my perspective, half the problem is the categorisation of vegan as a "health" choice. Yes, I can get vegan chocolate, but half the time it's also sugar-free, fat-free and gluten-free. Cheese is not immune to this effect. A lot of vegan products live in the health sections, and are expected to deliver while deviating in *every* way from the standard.
posted by Audreynachrome at 6:03 AM on May 11

Hmmm. Am I wrong in understanding that the European Union has much stricter requirements for food safety labeling than the USDA and GRAS List?
I know GRAS has plenty of crap ingredients considered safe, including various dyes.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:56 AM on May 11

I would just like to point out that in my neighbourhood, this ingredient would be interpreted as "grandma butter".
posted by Acari at 1:02 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]

Am I wrong in understanding that the European Union has much stricter requirements for food safety labeling than the USDA and GRAS List?

In France, all fats are gras.
posted by ryanrs at 1:17 PM on May 11 [7 favorites]

If they cannot adapt their cheese for sale, then at least they could pivot into the vegan food based adult film buisness, give their company name.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:13 PM on May 11

> I think it's weird not to use the term that it's replicating, so that we wind up with vegan spread, oat drink and ... I dunno, cultured protein product?

FDA Defends Decision To Reclassify Alternative Milks As ‘Nut Sweat’ (The Onion)
posted by Syllepsis at 8:47 PM on May 12 [1 favorite]

Jail, jail for ryanrs for 1000 years! Gras. Mon dieu!
posted by Wretch729 at 5:52 PM on May 14