MentalFloss has everything you’ve ever wanted to know and then some about how those individually-wrapped slices of cheesy comestible dairy by-products became the de facto representative of the United States in the ancient and tradition-bound world of cheesemaking.
Turns out, it really IS all the fault of J.L. Kraft. Here’s a 2001 article from American Heritage about Kraft and how he came up with the process of adding sodium phosphate to leftover cheese shards and blending it into a product that could be canned and stored indefinitely. Even though the product was decidedly of lower quality than fresh cheese, he made good use of advertising to pitch his product, which some competitors took to calling “embalmed cheese”, and by 1930 controlled 40% of the entire U.S. market for cheese products. His real lock came when he was able to sell his cheese to the U.S. Army to distribute to soldiers in their rations, creating a demand for his product when they returned home (much the same way Americans became hooked on cigarettes during those years). The bitter irony of American soldiers being turned on to processed cheese while fighting in the trenches of France should be lost on no one.
Now, I readily admit to using Velveeta for my macaroni-and-cheese recipe, and we do eat our fair share of the aforementioned individually-wrapped slices around here, but I draw the line at “dump dinners” where every ingredient comes out of a can, jar, or cardboard box pre-mixed, pre-cooked, pre-seasoned and pre-digested. Still I know that there is a whole segment of the American public that grew up on and continues to love “toy food”. So, if you are one of those people who collects supermarket checkout line cookbooks, has never met a recipe that couldn’t be improved with CheezWhiz or Cream of Mushroom Soup, AND own an iPhone (ooh, that just reduced the number of matches down to about 6), you might like this “iFood Assistant” app from Kraft. It should go well with your iBeer and iPopcorn
American ingenuity and chutzpah. We has it…. ;-)