Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Cheddar Cheese

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Ben Partridge explore why cheddar cheese is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Cheddar cheese, known for being orangey. Famous for being British maybe? Nobody thinks much about it so let's have some fun. Let's find out why cheddar cheese is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm very much not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Hello. Hello. And we are thrilled to be joined by an additional wonderful person. He's an award-winning comedy writer. He's a co-host

of Three Beans Salad and he's the creator of the Beef and Dairy Network podcast right here on Maximum Fun. Hello, Ben Partridge. Hi. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very pleased to be here. Good. That was my hope. I'm always like, are people going to have a good time? And here we are. That remains to be seen, but I'm hopeful. We'll have to see. We don't know. He might have a terrible time. I wouldn't say I'm too polite though, so you'll never know if I had a terrible time. But there'll be clues.

But seriously, I'm pleased to be here and I'm excited to learn something about the world. We have gotten a lot of requests from listeners for episodes about cheeses. There's one long ago episode about American cheese. And if people want to hear it, it's interesting because cheddar gets involved. But today is all about cheddar cheese. And Ben, what's your relationship to or opinion of cheddar cheese? Well, you mentioned American cheese. And I think if there was a cheese that was called British cheese, it would be cheddar. So I think, I don't know how it feels where you

live, but where I live, I'm in Wales, which is part of the UK. And I think UK wide, you'd kind of say that cheddar is the standard cheap unit of cheese. Do you know what I mean? If someone said, do you want some cheese? And I had to guess what they were going to give me, nine times out of 10, it'll be cheddar. So I think even if you just said cheese, people would picture cheddar. Do you know what I mean? It's the standard national cheese. And as a result, a lot of it is very, very bad because it's kind of the cheap cheese of Britain. In the same way that American cheese maybe is a bit like that. It's kind of like the cheap standard cheese. But a nice cheddar, oh my God. Oh my God. And the difference between a bad cheddar

and a nice cheddar is so huge that they're barely the same thing. So I sort of love and hate it. I'd like you to cause an international incident. So which country do you think makes the best cheddar? Well, I think cheddar has to... I think you can only make cheddar in the UK because it's one of those protective things. Although, maybe the US you're running rough shards over copyright law and making it regardless. Or maybe in China they're doing it, they don't seem to care about that kind of stuff very much. But I thought that it had to be made in cheddar, in a cave. Sort of like the champagne of cheeses, it has to be made in cheddar England.

Yes. Otherwise it's just sparkling cheese. So I think that's true, but it feels like that's the sort of thing that we're going to be told maybe isn't true, maybe by Alex, I'm not sure. I am here to say that it turns out it does not have protected designation of origin. And so unlike Parmesan from that part of Italy, it can just be made anywhere. And there's like a few very long names of Cheddars that have achieved a protected designation, but just Cheddar can be anywhere. Yeah.

Oh really? Yeah, we've stolen it. Yeah. So in which case I can answer the question. So you're asking where it makes the best Cheddar. Well, I think I've only ever had a British Cheddar. I've never had an American Cheddar, but it sounds appalling, an American Cheddar to be honest.

Maybe that's very rude of me. Within the UK, make a more localized regional incident. Within the UK, where can you get the best cheddar? Cheddar gorge, which is where it's from, right? Cheddar gorge is like a gorge. It's one of the only gorges I'm aware of. Or certainly one of the only gorges I've been in, I think. I've been in the gorge and that gorge is where cheddar is made. And yeah, I'm pretty certain that it has to be made in the gorge. Yeah. Cheddar gorge does make it sound like it's sort of a Grand Canyon, but carved of cheddar and you have sort of like the cheddar mines.

It is a bit like that, to be honest. So you're in Italy, right? I am in Italy. I do like cheddar and I have a heck of a hard time finding it here. I can find so many strange cheeses that I have never heard of before. I'm an American, I moved here, but I can't find cheddar here very easily. It's very difficult to find because they do not make it in Italy very commonly. Mason- Well that's the thing. I think Europeans in general, and I'm going to, here I am making

another potential international incident. I think Europeans are sniffy about British cheese. They're sniffy about cheddar and they think of themselves as better than us when it comes to basically all food. There's a bit of a weird thing in Europe about Britain having bad food and they're wrong. And cheddar is a great example of a nice food from Britain, but they're weird about it. They don't like admitting that British food is nice. So I think that's true. Like in France, you can't really get cheddar because they're like, why would we eat this when we have all of our wonderful Jesus of our own? You know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm here to say it needs to stop.

You're a cheddar advocate. I am. I've certainly become one in this podcast. I didn't realize this was inside me, but it turns out it was. You're going to give like a Greta Thunberg-like address to the UN, like, this needs to stop. You're ruining our future. It- It could bring everyone together. So tell me, I assume that you couldn't get cheddar in America, but I'm totally wrong, am I? Jeff- Yeah, cheddar, it sounds almost like the UK to me. Like my grocery store, especially as our broad grocery prices have gone up, I've taken weird comfort

in being able to get a big cheap block of cheddar, which is not amazing cheese, but is like fitting to my childlike palette of eating weird Ritz Bitz crackers and stuff as a kid. Like it tastes like the bland and cheesy cheese that I was really raised on a bit. I think it's partly because a lot of American cheese is often made with a young cheddar. Like it's not that amazing aged stuff, but that's kind of the genesis of it if it's cheesy. When I wanted to be really fancy, I would get myself some Irish aged cheddar. I think it was like Kerrygold Irish aged cheddar.

And I was like, man, I am this is I'm so international. I'm so cosmopolitan. Where even is Ireland? It's the world, you know? Who knows? In Britain, this might be the same way you are, cheddar is graded one to five normally on how mature it is. Oh, like a numbered ranking. Yeah. No, I don't think we have that in the US.

I think it's just aged cheddar and you got to kind of guess how old it is. Okay. Yeah, they'll tell you the amount of months. Yeah. Yeah. Out with the five, you've got to go for five. Anything under five is pointless. You need the most matured, like kind of quite hard to eat, sort of slightly acrid.

That's what I'm after. Yeah. Has a crunch to it. Because our other thing here, we rate it by the length of aging and then also a couple of states in the US have a reputation as being very, very good at cheddar. Wow. I had no idea. Tell them about the cheddar hats. Tell them. Yeah. The one big one, and it fits because they're the number one US producer is Wisconsin.

And then- The cheese heads of Green Bay Pack is right? That's a cheese thing. They all wear cheese on their heads. I'm aware of that. Cheeseheads, yeah. What could you know in American things? Yeah. But the other big one is Vermont, even though it's a very small state. Vermont is known for cheddar. Okay. I mean, I had a good fact for Wisconsin about cheeseheads. I've got nothing for Vermont apart from I could start a room with that. What do I know about Vermont? Bernie Sanders as a child. Yeah, he used to churn cheddar as a

child. That's why I heard. Yeah. Vermont is the, oh yeah, that's the state state. Yeah. There's approximately eight people who've ever been from Vermont. Bernie Sanders, Ben and Jerry, the band Fish. That's kind of it. Those are the Vermont people. That's a pretty good list. And they all know each other. Yeah, they all grew up on the same block in Vermont City, both in the US and the UK and then from both influences Canada. We have a lot of listeners in all those places and I think cheddar's big in all of them. It's like a dominant cheese and we'll talk about

why. Absolutely. And on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics and this week that's in a segment called We've Got Numbers and We've Got Statistics. We're thinking of threes, twos, and ones. There's more to count than we ever could count. More to add than could ever be summed. It's the numbers and stats. I want to hold up a cat. What I enjoyed about that, Alex, is that it began, the timbre of the voice began a bit

like the circle of life in the movie, and by the end you'd reached circle of life as recorded by Elton John for the soundtrack. You see what I mean? You incorporated both versions somehow. I feel very seen. Thank you. Wow. That was Elton John. I kind of never realized. Yeah, Disney, especially in the 90s, they were like Elton John, Phil Collins, just every artist they wanted was on speed dial. Phil Collins, I knew they had like chained up in a basement, but I didn't realize that

about Elton John. This is off topic, but are you aware of the film The Emperor's New Groove? Yes, absolutely. So, great film. With that one, that was originally meant to be called something else. It was meant to be quite an epic film, kind of in the mold of The Lion King. So, it was meant to be like South America's Lion King was the idea. And it ended up being this kind of in the mold of the Lion King. So it was meant to be like South America's Lion King was the idea. And it ended up being this kind of quite weird, slightly quirky, very comedy-ish film, which is very good. But when they wanted to make this kind of more epic version, Sting really wanted to do the music. Because they'd done Elton John and, as we

were saying, Collins is in the basement. So Sting was very much in that kind of Venn diagram of like, okay, when do I get to do my one? And he apparently wrote countless songs for this film. And then the film just got totally rewritten. They got rid of all his songs. But somewhere, in a basement, there's all these very heartfelt songs about South America by Sting that we'll never get to hear. Yeah. We did get, there is, if you go on YouTube, a storyboard. They were originally going to give Eartha Kitt, she played Yzma in that I think. They gave her, when it was still going to be a little bit more of a serious movie, they gave her this really cool sort of villainous song. So that's, it's really, that's the one part I wish they had kind of figured out a way to get that in because she doesn't get a lot of singing in that movie and she's Eartha

Kitt. Come on. Yeah. But she's great. I mean, it's still amazing. That character is incredible. Sorry. I've really, I've really taken a soft topic there. How did we get onto that topic though? I can't remember. Cheese. Elton John doesn't. Cheddar. Elton John. Lion King. Cheddar, Elton John, Lion King, Earthquake. Ann Sting's powerful cheddar addiction. Oh, I'm glad he bounced back. I'm glad he got out of it. Fields of Gold, that song's just about cheddar. It's all him wishing to hit another block.

But that's that's name was submitted by Alex G. We have a new name every week. Please make him as silly and wacky and baddest possible. Submit through Discord or just hit pot at gmail.com. And the first number this week, this money, it's about 300,000 British pounds. About a approaching a third of a million British pounds. That's the cash value of a recent cheddar cheese heist. Whoa. What? Someone stole almost a thousand wheels of luxury cheddar cheese in the UK.

That is a lot of cheese. I can't like how like I'm imagining these giant sacks of cheese people are trying to lift. That seems like a lot of cheese or was it like one really expensive fancy cheese? This was almost a thousand wheels of very aged 12 to 18 months cheddar cheese and they basically stole it by tricking a cheese monger into shipping it to them. False identity over the internet kind of heist. I see, I see.

So they catfished the cheese. They did. They cheese fished them. Yeah, that's right. I see. So they catfished the cheese. They did. They cheese fished them. Yeah. That's right. Cheese fishing. And a cheese retailer in London named Niels-Yard Dairy, they just got talked into shipping this to a warehouse in France after several months of negotiations with someone who seemed to have a deep knowledge of the cheese business and be really into it. And then as soon as the shipment was received, they broke off contacts. And so Neil's yard was not paid.

They were just so trusting. They were like, we'll get paid after because it's obviously, you know, on the level is obviously a cheese person. That's insane. Yeah. That's a really cr***piced movie, isn't it? It's literally just not paying for something, ignoring the invoices and then just disappearing. Bregman Yeah, I feel like that's what Hollywood's not telling us. Like, most of the heists, they just convince the Bellagio to mail them all the chips and that's it.

Steele Exactly. Steele Like I wanted to hear that they snuck the cheese as the wheels of an 18-wheeler. So it's like they had 18 cheeses per 18 wheeler that you can't even, you don't even realize it because they're driving on it. That's the, that's the Morrison Gromit version, I think. But so the, the cheese theft, this was October, 2024. About a week later, authorities announced the arrest of one 63 year old male. So it's probably just one relatively elderly person talked them into shipping a fortune and cheddar to them. They also got help from Scotland Yard, from French

police and from the Instagram account of Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef asked for tips on the cheddar theft. Did that actually help? I mean, did Jamie Oliver's Instagram account make any difference to them finding this old man? Or? I think they want to keep secret their investigative methods. But we also think that at least according to cheese sellers that were interviewed by

the press, they think it would have been hard to fence this cheese. It was just like too recognizable, too luxury. And so if anyone approached a cheese shop and said, oh, I just happened to have like a hundred thousand pounds worth of luxury cheddar, then they would call the police. Just a pawn shop with a bunch of wheels of fancy cheese. Like, yeah, someone just, you know, was bored of their cheese. Maybe you stole it to eat it. Like we're assuming he's going to sell it.

Maybe he just loves cheddar. Can't get it in France really. Yeah, now it's Wallace for sure. Maybe it was a bunch of mice in like a human suit. Their combined age was 63. They were each like, you know, a few months old. This is apparently one of many examples of cheese heists where they get caught because it's just difficult to sell.

Sorry, hang on. One of many examples of cheese heists? Yeah. So in 2016, thieves made a coordinated set of truck thefts in three separate shipments in Wisconsin. And then authorities just found all the trucks later in different parts of Wisconsin without any of the cheese sold because it was too difficult to sell it without anybody noticing.

That's so strange to me that they go through like, we're going to steal a lot of cheese, but they don't have like a seller, a person to sell it to lined up. They don't have any plan once they have the cheese. They're just like, you know what would be cool to steal? Hang on. Stay with me. Cheese. No one will see it coming. Right. They need to do the last step of who's going to buy it. Yeah, who's going to buy it? Seemingly don't. In 2015, Italian authorities caught thieves who stole nearly a million dollars worth of Parmigiano Reggiano. It was just too difficult to sell more than 2000 wheels of luxury

Parm. That's why they got caught. Yeah. I've had this happen. Someone approaches me in an alley. He's got like a big trench coat and he opens it up and there's just all these cheese slices like in it. And I'm like, wait, hang on. I'll take like all of them to be honest with you. It's on. I'll take all of them, to be honest with you. It's pretty good. Mason- I used to live near a pub in London where, if you went there on Saturday night, a guy used to come round with a black bin bag full of lamb that he'd stolen from the supermarket next door. And then you could buy it out with a bin bag. I never, I wouldn't say I never bought it, but he was an, an, an enterprising gentleman. A bin bag is a trash bag, right? It's, it's a garbage can. Yeah, cool.

My favorite weird one is this past July, 2024, a German police department, they needed to do an internal affairs investigation to fire one of their officers because a cheddar truck shipment flipped over on the road and one of the officers was accused of stealing loose cheddar cheese from the cleanup process. From the road. Yeah, like road cheddar from the truck flip. Now personally, once something touches the road, I feel like it's public property. That's always been my sense. I don't know where I get that from. Surely that's not legal, but as soon as something like from roadkill to oranges that fall off a truck, then it's just whoever gets to it first, right? Mason- I think in certain cases, like, so about 20 years ago in Cornwall in the west of the UK,

a container ship capsized or fell over or something, and all these containers kind of washed up on the beach. And because of some kind of ancient law, you can have it. It's public property now. If something falls off a ship and lands on the beach, you can just have it. Apparently that's the law. And it's based on something from, you know, 1200 or something. And so all these people were opening up the shipping containers, and most of them just had babies, trousers, or weird stuff they didn't need. But one of them was full of BMW motorbikes. Oh wow. And so in that time, all the young men had the same brand new BMW motorbike that had fallen off

a ship. And apparently it was totally legal. I've got a great idea for a cheese heist. You sink a cheese ship and then once it gets to the shore it's legal. You can have it. This is so obvious. Why aren't we doing it right now? Yeah. Cheddar laundering. Once it goes through the ocean. Yeah. But I agree with you. I feel like once the cheddar's on the ground, if you're cleaning up the cheddar, it's like have a bit for yourself.

Yeah, of course. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Fuel your work, you know? You gotta eat. Yeah. Yeah. The next number here, this is 88 pounds of weight, which is about 40 kilos. 88 pounds of weight. That's how much cheddar went into a cheese nativity scene. And we'll have pictures for people. In 2015, a brand called Pilgrim's Choice from Ireland. They commissioned food artist Prudence State to carve a cheddar nativity at her workshop in Tookesbury, Gloucestershire in the UK. And the scene features Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Magi made of cheddar. There's also cheddar

shavings to simulate straw on the floor of the manger. It's very good. And also one of the Magi is depicted carrying a condiment called Branston's Pickle Relish, which is apparently a common cheese condiment in the UK. Absolutely. Branston Pickle is like, cheese and pickle sandwich is a big thing in Britain. I don't know if that's made it to the US. No.

And yeah, and the two things would be cheddar cheese and Branston Pickle. Branston Pickle on its own is so acrid and acidic and horrible. It's genuinely horrible to eat. But if you have it with a bit of cheese, it kind of levels off and then it's actually nice. That seems to be with a lot of, and I'm actually someone who, I enjoy British food, so this is not an insult, but I've noticed a lot of it is like, no, don't eat this on its own. It will make you violently ill. But once you pair it with like a carrot, it's fine. Yeah. Right.

Once you pair it up, you can take off all of your safety gear and be around. It's a beautiful nativity. You sent me a photograph of it and what a wonderful piece of work. She did a great job. I wouldn't have guessed this was cheese. It does look like cheese now that I know it is. Do they get to eat it after Christmas? Oh, the story doesn't say. Slate.com is the main source. I would hope people got to eat it. Right.

Because cheddar ages effectively and don't waste food. I would hope people got to eat it. Right? Because cheddar ages effectively and don't waste food. You know? Great. I mean, and Jesus is already cool with you eating them. So like, I think it's fine. Like Jesus is already, like, like you can communion wafer with a little bit of cheese

Jesus, some cheeses. Beautiful. It's the spirit of the season. And we have a few more giant amounts of cheddar as well. It's the spirit of the season. We have a few more giant amounts of cheddar as well. The next number is 1,400 pounds of weight. That's a lot. So that's approaching 1,000 kilos.

And that's the size of a cheddar wheel gifted to US President Andrew Jackson in 1835. This one I knew. They had, I mean, I think a lot of presidential inaugurations had like cheese wheels as part of festivities, but yeah, this was like a truly gigantic one. Andrew Jackson, first president I actually like read a book about as a kid. Horrible person, terrible guy. But the cheese wheel thing is fun. So I don't know the first thing about Andrew Jackson. I've heard his name. That's

all I know about him. Can you give me a kind of one minute rundown of the best of Andrew Jackson? Steele- Genocidal maniac, but he did love his cheese. And he also beat people up in Congress. Mason- What? Steele- You know. Mason- Oh wow. Okay. Bregman- We basically had a first six presidents from Virginia or Massachusetts who were relatively

stuffy and then Andrew Jackson was a genocidal slave owning but also party guy after them who kind of opened up democracy to white men in a way it hadn't been before. Yeah. Oh, wow. And he's on the $20 bill. Yeah. It was as if America had elected a bloodthirsty homicidal bear as president, who incidentally did a few potentially good things, but mostly just killed a lot of people. Midway through his second term, dairy farmers in Oswego, New York, shipped him 1,400 pounds of cheese and a giant wheel to celebrate his work.

Have they carved the words, please don't kill us into the side of the, into the world? He did, he mostly killed mostly Native Americans. So white people were not as afraid of him. Yeah, he'd kill one white person in a duel. And otherwise it was sort of a large scale thing. Right, right. Who is the duly? Who is he dueling?

I mean like he repeatedly killed one person. Like he was just in lots of duels. He did both genocide and like sort of individual more personal murder that he himself like pulled the trigger on. He just loved killing. He would occasionally do a sort of intimate personal acoustic gig when it came to killing. Yeah. Yeah. Some arti- like he didn't always outsource the killing. Sometimes he did like artisanal murder. I see. Yeah. Got it. And yeah, in 1835, he just receives this massive cheddar wheel and leaves it in the lobby of the White House for about two years.

And just lets people eat it, take pieces of it whenever, and they end up disposing of a lot of it after it had aged too much and made the building smell. And oddly, this was part of a trend because those same New York farmers donated an 800-pound cheddar wheel to Jackson's successor, President Martin Van Buren. Before that, in 1802, a Massachusetts town gave a 1,200-pound cheese wheel to President Thomas Jefferson. And then around Jackson's time in 1840, Britain's Queen Victoria married Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha And one of her wedding presents was a cheddar wheel weighing more than 1,000 pounds in weight. So several hundred kilos

So I kind of lost track who had the biggest cheese. Was it Jackson? We think Jackson I found conflicting stuff that claimed Jefferson, but most of the sources say Jackson. I see. Yeah. So he wins, I guess. I don't know. Well, he's dead now, so. So he loses.

So he loses, yes. And going further back in history, the next number is the 1100s AD. So about 900 years ago. That's the earliest written record of cheddar as a name for a cheese. Oh, interesting. Do we know the etymology? Did it just come from someone named Joe Cheddar, who figured out how to make cheese? So it came from the place that Ben mentioned, the Cheddar Gorge, and there's a village called Cheddar next to it. We don't know the origin of that name for the place. But one key source this week is a book called Cheese, Wine, and Bread, Discovering the Magic of Fermentation in England, Italy, and France.

That's by food writer Katie Quinn. And she says that this earliest written record of cheddar as a cheese comes from the court of England's King Henry II, very early Henry. And he also declared cheese from cheddar to be the best cheese in the world. I mean, it sounds like that's still perhaps a prevalent idea of people who do come from Cheddar Gorge. It's a whole thing. And it brings us into takeaway number one.

Cheddar is the name of a place and the name of a cheese making process, which spread worldwide because it was easy to ship cheddar cheese to London. Hmm. Because it's a wheel, so you just kind of roll it down downhill to London. It turns out the word cheddar refers to related things. There's this place cheddar and also there's one step in the cheese making process that became common in cheddar, which is that you stack blocks of curds on top of each other to push the water out of each other through gravity.

That's called cheddar ring, cheddar ring. So that gives it, does that give it a distinctive texture? Yeah, cheddar is a relatively hard and relatively dry cheese. And so that's a good way to achieve that. Cheddar cheese no longer has to be from cheddar and it can also be made without doing that. There's another modern way called dry stirring that kind of gets that same texture and flavor without the stacking. So there's also cheddar cheese that's not from cheddar and has not been cheddar.

That seems far afield. That seems like that's a different cheese. It feels like there's a bit of mission creep when it comes to cheddar. So I just looked this up because I was curious because we're talking about cheddar as a place because there's the cheddar man, which is the like when you hear cheddar man, it sounds like, oh, this is gonna be fun. It's gonna be like a man made out of cheese. It is a skeleton.

And it's like the remains of a very, very early, like Mesolithic man. And I just thought that was interesting because I was like, wait, Cheddar the place, and then Cheddar man, it is all making sense now. I thought they were just making fun of this poor dead Mesolithic man. Like, hi, you're a real Cheddar man, aren't you? Now that you're dead, I don't know. I never really thought about it. The Cheddar man, they did something like they sequenced his DNA or something, and then worked

out that he's got a descendant that they could find, who lives, I don't know if he lives near Cheddar, I can't remember. But I remember they sort of found this bloke and went, he is the relation of this Neolithic man. And just looks like a normal man. I was kind of hoping he'd be like, you know, heavy of brow, holding a club, you know. You're totally right. And I'm looking at an image of it and it's funny because like, yeah, they have like this, the reconstruction of the Cheddar Man and then is like descendant. And you know what's funny is the nose is kind of the same. Oh really?

Yeah. You can kind of see it a little bit. Right. But he's not wearing a bearskin and dragging the club. Yeah, but I bet if you put that on him. Yeah, this place, Cheddar, could be famous without the cheese because it's a place in Southwest England in Somerset County. Has this beautiful gorge and set of limestone caves that you can take tours of. Then the Cheddar Man is the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain.

It's somebody who lived about 10,000 years ago. Also his genetic markers suggest he had very dark skin pigmentation. That's one of the many pieces of evidence we have that people originated in Sub-Saharan Africa and then spread across the rest of the world. Several thousand years later, there's a political entity called England. People name this place Cheddar. Dairy farmers in the area realize that they can store and age their cheese in these caves in this gorge.

They start putting it there. Then from there, that is the origin of something called cheddar cheese but it took more centuries to come up with the cheddaring process so we also think that King Henry the second when he ate cheese from cheddar it probably tasted different and had a different texture than what we think of as cheddar cheese it means a lot of different things. Had that nice cave cheese sort of smell. We love putting cheese in caves, don't we?

Yeah, and the scourge is full of caves. And people said, oh, we can put all the cheese in it. Great. And we don't have to build a thing. Good. Yeah, no. It's perfect. It's a nice stable temperature.

Great for storing cheese. Really confuses mice. It's a great system. Yeah, and the super fast version of how most cheeses are made, because all cheese is manmade, you take milk, you combine it with enzymes and with bacteria that make it ferment. Fermentation is microbes acting on something.

And you turn that into solid curds, which then get drained and squeezed until they're the kind of cheese you want. And so when they came up with this cheddar ring step, they were able to make a lot of cheese, because gravity just lets the curds squish each other. And also ends up making a relatively hard and dry cheese, because you're pushing so much water out of it. Yeah, you're working smarter, not harder, with the cheddar cheese process. Yeah. And this is all happening in a cave, right?

Yeah, in a cave. Yeah. What are the kind of bat-based losses like? Bats are basically mice with wings. Thanks for bringing that up. Well, you got to pay the bats some protection money for letting the cheese be there. It's just a bat racket and it's how it is. I think it's a heavy percentage of bat wastage, I would imagine. You get this name and also this process. Those are both things that get called cheddar cheese.

And then this cheese spreads worldwide because of a set of geographical and historical coincidences. And the main one is where the cheddar gorge is located. Because in the 1700s, Britain begins to industrialize. That means the city of London's population explodes. It gets much more populous all of a sudden. And the whole British food system says, how do we feed London? And one of the most popular ways was shipping this cheese from the Cheddar Gorge to London. It was a distance that went pretty well with horsepower transportation. And also this cheese ages okay. If it gets a little bit older,

that's just more flavor. All right. So we got basically, so it was the population of London was increasing because of the industrialization. So a lot of people were coalescing there for labor. Yeah, they basically built a bunch of factories directly next to homes. And then all the homes just filled up with people working in the factories and having babies and it was a lot of urbanisation all of a sudden. Ah, you got a baby? Here's some cheese. Get some cheese in this baby. This baby looks much too healthy. Please fill it with cheese. This baby needs to look much more British stat. And yeah, and so then the people in this cheddar area say, hey, we should like focus on cheese making even more than we have before. We should have more cows, less crops in our fields.

And then they also win a competitive battle against other cheese making regions of England, in particular the County of Cheshire in Northwest England. But a lot of their win is just because their distance to London is easier than Cheshire's distance to London. It's a coincidence. There's a really old pub in London called the Old Cheshire Cheese, which is like one of those pubs that claims to be the oldest pub in London, but probably isn't. But there's about 50 pubs in London that say they're the oldest pub in London. But it's an old one and it's called the old Ye Olde. I like a Ye Olde. Yeah, the Ye really sells it. Then I'm thinking that sounds old.

Exactly. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. I used to go there quite a lot, but I wonder if that's because yeah, there was cheese from Cheshire coming in, I guess. It's probably named after it. Yeah. Yeah, because across cheese from Cheshire coming in, I guess. It's probably named after it, yeah. Yeah, because across the whole history of cheese making, it's often just been a way to preserve dairy and preserve milk. And so the cheese became a key way of feeding the city. And as cheddar kind of wins this competitive battle, it also becomes people's favorite. People just want that even after there are better railways and steamboats to bring more cheese from more places. People in the 1700s in this key window

of time just get into cheddar as a style. Wow. Because it's familiar. So familiar things are going to be your favorite because you grew up with it. And then that becomes a particularly key thing for British people who go out and colonize the world. As they go to North America and Australia and take over land from people, they say, cheddar reminds me of home.

And also I just want to have that cheese here. And you can make it anywhere. You can do your cheddar egg and your milk anyplace, not just in this gorge. And so... Yeah. It's like, what is this like delicious spicy food? Replace it with cheddar. Cheddar.

Hot food with flavor? No, thank you. Some cheese, please. And that's a particularly big impact in the US and Canada. And so the combined global reach of the UK, US, and Canada make cheddar a global cheese where it could have been a different cheese if the cheddar gorge was different distance from London or if railways or steamboats got going sooner in technological history. There's a lot of like branching paths where

Cheshire cheese or another cheese could have been the big British one right when they were building this empire. There's a lot of sliding doors moments in history when it comes to cheese. Are you aware of that film, right? Yes. I just imagined a big sliding wheel. That was great. Like yeah, people could have really gone to yogurt instead. And then yogurt would be the thing. We would have been so much healthier. Such better gut biomes.

Yeah. So it's a coincidence and also a cheese people really do love. And that's a ton of numbers and a big takeaway. We're going to take a quick break, then return with one of England's colonies giving it its cheddar comeuppance. Wow. Cheddar venge. Big hook.

Big hook. Great. Chet-venge. Hello? Hannah? Yeah. It's Clint McElroy. Hi, Hannah Rack. Oh my God. Hello. I don't know if you know who I am. Oh, I do. I love the Adventure Zone.

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you as our Maximum Fund member of the month. It's awesome. I love it. So what made you decide to become a member of Max Fund? You know, it was so long ago. I'm not sure what the exact moment where I decided it. So what made you decide to become a member of Max Vaughn? You know, it was so long ago, I'm not sure what the exact moment where I decided was. I think I've kept it up intentionally because a lot of those different podcasts have been there for me when I felt really alone and sad and just needed something to laugh at. Aww. Well that's Hannah.

Thank you so much. Thanks for being a member. Thanks for being a Taz fan. Thanks for all the nice things you had to say about me specifically. And I guess my kids, I guess. If you're a MaxFun member, you can become the next MaxFun member of the month. Support us at MaximumFun.org slash join. Jackie Cation, hi, and welcome to the MaximumFun.org podcast, the Jackie and Laurie show where

we talk about stand-up comedy and how much we love it and how much it enrages us. We have a lot of experience and a lot of stories and a lot of time on our hands. So check us out. It's one hour a week and we drop it every Wednesday on MaximumFun.org. And we're back and with lots more numbers for you. The next one is 1851. 1851 is when two farmers in a town called Rome, New York constructed a cheese making factory. All right. Funny that it's called Rome, New York because it is not Italy, I would like to point out. And the factory was built in a day. So it's a doubly bad name.

Yeah. And another key source this week is a book called Cheese and Culture, and that's by University of Vermont food science professor Paul Kinstead. And he says that this cheese making factory changed the world. Wow. Oh boy. Before 1851, a lot of cheese in the Anglo-American world came from small farmers. It would be one of many things the farm family made, especially because according to the gender norms, women could get involved. They could do that while men did literal heavy lifting elsewhere on the farm. So before 1851, you'd get cheese in small batches from farms.

And then Jesse and George Williams of Rome, New York, set up a factory that acquired milk, turned it into cheese. That was all they did. And they mostly made cheddar. So they kind of industrialized cheddar. Yeah. And then once they did that, they were making a fortune. Everybody copied them. And within about 30 years, almost all cheese in the US is from factories instead of farms.

From the 1850s to the 1880s, it just flips completely. Mmm. I love that factory fresh taste. tastes like low wages and unidentifiable machine oils. Yeah. And, and also this is the start of a lot of people coloring their cheddar. You can use substances like a natto to make it a more orangey color or a more yellow color. Because if, if it's not from cows that were fed on grass, it doesn't turn a colour. It's usually pale. Yeah. When you get one of those orangey cheddars, you know it's a really s***y cheddar. You know the ones that are like weirdly orange? I don't know why they do it, because it doesn't make

it more appetising. Like what did it look like before they coloured it orange is the question. What was so bad about it? That is funny, because in the US we had a period of time where we would color our ketchup to be like purple and green. So Americans have an interesting idea about like what's visually appealing. Right. We want most of our foods to be the colors of like NFL teams, I think. If we can get a teal in there, that's great. Yeah. You know, like the aposematic coloration in nature where it's like if something's really

brightly colored, you should maybe stay away from it because it's probably poisonous. We have kind of the opposite thing where it's like if it's neon and slightly glowing, we want to put it in our mouth. Yeah, we're all sucking on that nuclear rod from that one Simpsons episode. Just really enjoying it. God, that looks good. Because there's mac and cheese, boxcraft mac and cheese. It is a very bright, bright, bright orange, like highlighter orange. And I just assumed that's the color cheese. And then I remember there was this brand, I think, called Annie's mac

and cheese, supposed to be more natural. And it was like sort of a pale, creamy white. I'm like, this isn't cheese then, like what's going on? Like I was so confused cause I was a kid and I had just assumed like cheddar was naturally that color. So when my mom explained to me like, well, they add coloring to it, my mind was blown and I still couldn't like figure out how to eat the

non-coloured cheese because it was too weird. Yeah, and then you just ran away from home at that point. You were like, I don't trust anybody. You've all lied to me my whole life about cheese. I don't know what's real anymore. Obviously the big turning point for that factory in Rome, New York, was when they brought out cheddar by a blast, which was an attractive blue colour. We did have the double blasted goldfish crackers, which were supposed to be like double blasted with flavour, which implies that there's a primary blasting of flavour that happens to give the goldfish crackers their

taste. I actually have a quick number about Goldfish, which is 1998. That is when the Goldfish brand started promoting a flavor blasted version of the crackers. We think they partly did that because Cheddar goldfish were by far the dominant flavor in sales. And so they just said, what other ways can we expand? Let's do a more cheddar flavor blasted with cheddar cracker. God, it's so interesting.

So like in the UK, I would assume like, is most cheddar not bright orange colored or are there still bright orange cheddars? No, it's not really. It's normally like a creamy colour. You occasionally get orange stuff, but there's really bargain basement cheddars. You find it sort of in a vending machine in the bathroom of a petrol station is where you get the bright orange cheese. Exactly. There's also a cheese called red leicester, which I don't know if it's made its way around the world in quite the same way. But that's a bit like cheddar but red. We really don't have that here and it kept coming up in my sources about cheddar history

as a competing cheese that's still big in the UK. Yeah, it's a big one. But that's kind of, that's maybe our version of an orange cheese. But that's so interesting that we just started deciding to colour it orange. Because before then, it's not like colouring something orange that is naturally orange, right? Like enhancing sort of the orange colouration of say, like, oh this is orange flavoured, so it's orange. Like, why orange? Why did we do that? BLAIR Biggest reason was that some cheddars and cheeses were orange if they were from small farms.

Nicole Larson I see. Matt Monella Because when cows eat grass, there's proteins and pigments in the grass that make the resulting dairy products more orangey. And so then when it became more industrial and maybe we fed cows on whey or other stuff instead of grass, then their berry came out plain color. So it was like too pale. And people said, this is weird. So there was like a original artisanal orange and then we lost it and then we faked it is the process.

I see. That's interesting. Yeah. And it varies by animal species because goats, if they eat that grass that has those orangey pigments, goats just don't happen to retain the pigments for their dairy. So that's why goat cheese is all white. Right. It's just, there's never been an artisanal orange goat cheese because of goat biology

being different from cow biology. Until now. We're going to make millions guys. When you give them cheetahs, when you give them flaming hot cheetahs, it does come out. Dangerously cheesy. Yeah. It turns out that humans, like, on a base level, want things to be orange. Orange things are, do tend to be tasty. Mm-hmm. That's why I'm always sucking on traffic cones. And all this USification of cheddar, it leads to a mini takeaway number two.

Americans nearly ended cheddar cheese making in Cheddar, England. What? Whoa. USA. USA. There was a stage where the US was making so much cheddar, we started shipping it all to England and that just economically wiped out the cheese makers in Somerset and in England more broadly.

Didn't we have like a cheddar explosion where we had way too much cheddar and we didn't know what to do with it? And so we just started like our underground cheddar facilities. There's that too. Yeah. Like basically since this date where two guys made a cheese factory, the US has been overproducing dairy. And the like first cheese factories were also pretty much just making cheddar,

because what we think of as American cheese that came from kind of later machinery developments and also mixing in Colby cheeses and some not cheddar. So these cheese factories just make relatively flavorful cheddar. And then in the late 1800s, they start exporting it everywhere they can, primarily Britain, because the US demand is filled up. Everybody has enough cheese. Just rooms full of stacks and stacks of cheese, just overwhelming the American living room. Yeah, apparently by 1875, so 25 years after the first US cheese factory, by 1875, the US was shipping 100 million pounds

of weight of cheddar to England. And most English cheese makers went out of business because they were not as industrial and there was just a flood of cheap cheddar from the United States. Oh my God. Wow. Yeah. And so there's a few like recent cheese makers in cheddar making cheddar, but most of them are either like reviving an old brand or just straight up a new business because the American economy crushed everybody in the late eighties, two hundreds. Good work guys.

So wait, so now like in the UK does most, I would assume cheese in the UK does come from the UK. Just maybe they industrialized as well. That's right. Yeah. It has swung back around where it's not as, they're industrialized up and it's still not that economically wise to bring it in from the US. And I think also partly because the brand of cheeses from the United States is not super strong in the rest of the world. We basically, I've never really known why this is, but we basically don't import any

food from America. Like you never see made in the USA on any of our food, ever. Apart from the barbecue sauce Sweet Baby Ray's. For some reason it's having a kind of renaissance. Yeah, it's strange. Good for Ray. Good for sweet baby Ray. He's probably grown up by now. Sweet middle-aged man Ray. I don't know why that is though. I guess it'll be to do with economic forces that I don't know anything about. Do people from the UK think like food from the US, like how do they feel about it? Do

they think like, ah, it's going to be all gross, like cheese puffs and giant things of soda? TobyEarneTwinkies, whatever they might be. Or is it more neutral? TobyEarneOh, it's not neutral, I'm afraid. I don't want to be rude, but it became a big talking point with Brexit. This is quite a boring story maybe, but when we did Brexit, there's a big thing about how... I think what it was was we had lots of deals with the EU and European countries, and so all of our food came from the EU. And then those people that were trying to say Brexit was a good idea were saying, well, listen, if we leave the EU,

we can then get our food from elsewhere. We can get it from America, where it might be cheaper, we can destroy our own cheddar industry once again. And then the people who were trying to argue against Brexit then started looking into American food practices and were saying like, oh, we don't want this stuff in Britain. So the big one that became like a big talking point in the news was a thing called chlorinated chicken. Are you aware of this? Because we wash our chicken? Oh. Yeah, so it's like a practice where chickens are slaughtered and then washed in chlorine. It's a very diluted chlorine, but yes.

Well done for standing up for the practice. To be fair. Well done for standing up for the practice. To be fair. And so that became a big thing in like the newspapers was like, we don't want chlorinated chicken. And there was this idea that kind of all American food is like washed in chlorine. And it became a big sort of national talking point. So that's the kind of, that's where we are with American food.

Yeah, our favorite cookie is Clorio's. Let's see, what else? I don't know if this is the case in the UK, but in the US, eggs are washed. So you have to refrigerate them because we don't like, if there's like a little feather stuck to an egg, we're like, this came out of a chicken's butt. And I like to pretend it didn't. But in,

in Italy eggs are not washed. So yeah, you'll occasionally get an egg with like a little feather stuck to it because it came from a chicken. It's fine. You're not eating the shell. You're eating the stuff inside. So it's cool. But like those eggs, you can leave out on the counter and they last just fine because they're covered in a sort of waxy, it's a natural thing that the chicken covers the egg in because its original purpose is to make a baby chicken. So to keep pathogens out, there's this waxy kind of coating on it.

You can't really feel it that well, it's not like gross. You can barely feel it, but yeah,'s not like gross. It's just, you can barely feel it. But yeah, just this like slight waxy coating that keeps bacteria and other pathogens from entering the egg easily. And that also for the non-fertilized eggs keeps them fresher at room temperature. But for US eggs, like if you go to the US and you're from anywhere else in the world where you're not like so anal about chicken butts, the eggs you cannot actually leave out very long because they don't have that coating.

And so it's actually less hygienic to clean the eggs, which is sort of counter intuitive, I guess. But we love, just everything has to be like, like we hate the idea of having better chicken. I want it to be homogenised, unidentifiable meat product." Mason- I can report that in the UK we have the chicken butt juice coated eggs. Carly- Okay, yes. Well that's how nature intended. Mason- Also there's a weird thing where American eggs, I've only been to America maybe twice, but I've noticed each time, you guys have really white eggs. They're always really white. We don't, brown eggs scare us. We're afraid.

And brown eggs are kind of new, a new trend. Yeah. Yeah. Like now people are like, oh, this is like how eggs, how God intended eggs to be. There was like, I think in the fifties, this is when these kinds of things, like, I don't know, there, there was like this big discomfort with anything that was sort of like irregular or looked like it came out of the ground. We didn't like that. And that brings us back to cheddar, because cheddar is this perfect square block of homogenous colour. It's just the same all the way through. It's just orange and you can cut it and it looks exactly the same. It's weird actually how there's nothing in it. It's just orange and it's just, you can cut it and it looks exactly the same. It's weird actually how sort of, there's nothing in it.

It's just the same. It's perfect. And it's so, yeah, it's so safe. I did go through an adjustment period here with having certain cheeses where the texture is different. Like the closer you get to the rind, the more hard and dense it is. And then into the center, sometimes it can like have holes or almost be a little more wet. And so I was like, well, is something wrong with this cheese? No, it's just normal

cheese. That's okay. It's okay that it's like has a different texture. It's just that the process is not so, it doesn't have that same chattering process of like squeezing it too much so that it's more airy in the middle. It's very good. This all leads into the very last takeaway of the main show because takeaway number three, in World War II, the US figured out how to can cheddar cheese. God bless the United States of America. Best country in the world. And you can also still buy and eat this.

Uh, it is, it was made by a food scientist at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, uh, and it's called Cougar Gold. So I do have to admit, like before recall, before recording, uh, I was just looking through the pictures Alex had sent and this made me do an involuntary, ugh. Yeah, we were about to hit record and then I was like, Katie, are you okay? I was very concerned. Yeah, I was just like, ugh.

Yeah. Well, part of it is because you can see, I'm looking at a can, like a tuna can, it says Cougar gold, it's got like yellow stripes on it. And inside is sort of this just like pale cheese substance that does appear to be solid, or at least a semi-solid. And the top of the cheese has sort of the lines in it, from like the canning process, like those concentric circles from the lid that has pressed this cheese into this confined space. And it's got like a fun little slice taken out of it. So you can see that indeed it is, it is cheese in there.

We have pictures, this was covered by writer Lee Chavez Bush for Atlas Obscura. This was a World War II goal because the US government said, hey, we're shipping cheese to the boys in Europe and the Pacific Ocean. What if it could travel in something more solid than a waxy wheel and also last longer? It turns out there's a lot of good reasons to put cheese in a waxy wheel or another porous covering like that, because cheese is alive. There's bacteria in it. They keep releasing gases. If you try to put it in something solid like the short tin cans used for tuna, the gas from the bacteria will distend and then burst the metal can and destroy it. And you'll have it everywhere. Yeah, just like then, which could actually be useful in World War II. You throw one of those at the Germans and they get a nasty surprise of exploding cheese.

Kugelgold, what is this? Oh, and then it takes them out. Is this a tasty snack for me? Bam! Yeah, and then a dairy husbandry professor named NS Golding. Dairy husbandry professor. I got, yeah, that's great. And he was at what's now Washington State University.

They created a bacterial culture that can create a cheddar cheese, but with as low of a gas emission as possible so that the cheddar can remain canned for decades if you refrigerate it. Wow. That's really good news for once we kill all life on earth that we could still potentially have cheese around. Yeah, bunker cheddar. Yeah.

Bunker cheddar. Really good. And, and yeah, they named this Cougar Gold because Cougars are the mascot of Washington State. And also this guy's name was Golding. The cheese has a golden color. So it's called Cougar Gold. And the creamery at Washington State still makes it. Kind of makes it sound like you milked a Cougar though.

Kind of makes it sound like you milked a cougar though. Kind of makes it sound like you milked a cougar. I bet there's a bunch of cougars somewhere locked up being milked for their precious cougar cheese. Yeah, I mean, I don't see cougars on the street. They're probably on the farm, you know? Makes sense. Yeah. You know, we never milk predators,

which isn't like, we never milk carnivores for their milk, which makes me wonder, like, is it just that they don't produce that much milk or is there something off about the flavor? Third thing, they eat us? Probably not that. It's probably... I mean... If there's one thing I know about humans is that imminent death is not a barrier for us

to learn how to cultivate some weird food. And this canned cheese that sounds like cooker cheese, apparently some alumni of Washington State held on to a can that they bought in 1987 and then brought it to the creamery recently for the staff to taste it and they said it was great and extra aged. But you can- Well, their staff, of course they would say it's great. Like, yes. Right, and then they're like talking to the person at the front desk, like Janice,

why did you let these people in? Why? You're fired. Oh man, would you taste the decades old canned cheese, guys? It is technically aging, but not in the same way that cheese that can breathe ages. So I wonder like if the taste is that different because you like would the taste be different from between the fresh and the old canned cheese? Yeah apparently wasn't that different it was just good but like

a little bit more aged because yeah the can really keeps it as it is And this is great because I love I love that like we have figured out a way to keep thing homogenized Not only in texture, but temporally like everything the same throughout time. That is like the ultimate American goal Yeah, Ben Katie and I are gonna chant USA for a while you can just I'll join in I'm gonna join in have a cup of I'm signed up as as you guys like to say I'm signed up to the project. Let's do it Folks, that's the main episode for this week, and I want to say another huge thank you to Ben Partridge, who makes at least two of my favorite podcasts in the world.

We're linking both those podcasts, Three Bean Salad, as a wonderful chatty funny show, where Ben Partridge and Henry Packer and Mike Wozniak explore something but also simply have fun. And then the Beef and Dairy Network podcast is my single favorite fictional universe in podcasting. And also very funny, incredible sound design and music. And that show is one of our fellow Maximum Fun shows. So I'm so thrilled Ben could join us to talk about this British cheese that also Americans took. Anyway, you're here in the outro of the episode and it's got fun features for you,

such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, cheddar is the name of a place and the name of a cheese making process and Cheddar cheese does not have to be from cheddar or made that way and the cheese spread worldwide because it was easy to move Cheddar cheese to 1700s London. Off of that mega takeaway, mini takeaway number two, Americans nearly ended cheddar cheese making in cheddar England. Americans nearly ended cheddar cheese making in cheddar England. Takeaway number three, in World War II, Americans figured out how to can cheddar cheese, and

you can still eat that today. And then this was a very numbers heavy episode. Cheddar cheese heists, cheddar cheese nativities, cheddar wheels honoring 1800s leaders, and more. Those are the takeaways. 1800s leaders and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximumfun.org.

Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the surprising US obsession with cheddar cheese on top of apple pie. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of 19 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows, including Beef and Dairy Network special shows. That's all just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maxbumpfund.org. Key sources include a little library of books about cheese,

cheese, wine, and bread discovering the magic of fermentation in Cheese, Wine, and Bread, Discovering the Magic of Fermentation in England, Italy, and France. That's by professional food writer Katie Quinn. Another book called Cheese and Culture. That's by University of Vermont food science professor Paul Kinstett. Another book called Our Fermented Lives, A History. That's by award-winning food historian Julia Skinner. We also lean on tons of digital resources about food and food making, such as Food and Wine Magazine, Gastro Obscura, TastingTable.com, The Smithsonian, and I'm also going to link the past SIF episode about American cheese with special guest Bill Oakley. That's a wonderful episode and also gets into how cheddar cheese intersects with American cheese and is also separate from it.

That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, Ben taped this in the country of Wales, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free CIF Discord, where we're sharing

stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Cause each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 198, that's about the topic of wrestling. Fun fact, the all-time gold medals leader in Olympic wrestling

is the USSR. Specifically, the Soviet Union, not including the time when that was the country of Russia. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the BUDDHOS Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker owned network of artist owned shows supported directly by you.