Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2021 March 3

= March 3 =

How many string cheeses are eaten in the US every day?
yeah. pretty random question. Fakecrabcake (talk) 03:06, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
 * And fairly obscure. Unless someone has actually taken a survey, the best you could probably do is Google the subject of how much a given product is sold in America annually, then do the arithmetic (as needed) to guesstimate the per capita consumption for a given time period. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:54, 3 March 2021 (UTC)


 * If you really want to know, you'll probably need to read some kind of report in a cheese industry journal.  Those will be behind a paywall. This article will cost you a few bucks to read, but the one fact they give you free is that Private Label brands of cheese sticks/string cheese moved 27.7 million units over a twelve week period.
 * That tracks with the chart on this article that you can barely read showing private label brands selling 103 million units in a year.
 * Not sure how much a "unit" is, but I'm sure 103 million of them is a lot of cheese. ApLundell (talk) 04:24, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The natural meaning, I suggest, would be a package. (Compare stock keeping unit.)  One specific brand mentioned on the page comes in packages of 12.  If this is typical, then 103 million packages sold per year would be equivalent to about 3,400,000 string cheses per day.  Of course that 103 million was only the private labels, so the actual number would be larger, if the package size of 12 really is typical. --142.112.149.107 (talk) 07:08, 4 March 2021 (UTC)


 * for those like me who had no idea what "string cheeses" might be. --ColinFine (talk) 09:41, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * According to the article, it's available in the UK, but maybe it's less popular than in America. It's basically Mozzarella processed in such a way that you can pull strips from it. You don't have to do that, of course - you can bite into it like with any other cheese stick. Pulling the strips off it maybe forces you to slow down a little bit. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:14, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Dairylea Strip Cheese is the British version, intended mainly for the school packed-lunch market. Not for connoisseurs of Stilton, Yarg or Stinking Bishop, I imagine. Alansplodge (talk) 15:04, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, I don't think I've ever seen a flavorful variety of cheese in "string" form. It's always a bland variety of mozzarella targeted at kids. To be fair, maybe it just wouldn't work with other cheeses. It'd be tricky to make a block of stilton that could be peeled off in strips. ApLundell (talk) 17:48, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Mozzarella undergoes special processing to give it the stringy consistency. The processes is called pasta filata and is used not only for mozzarella, but other cheeses with similar properties.  -- Jayron 32 13:04, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Stinking Bishop. I wonder how it compares with Limburger? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:01, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * As a long-term fan of Stinking Bishop, I can confirm that it does indeed have a dangerously pungent odour, but is surprisingly mild in taste, probably less than a ripe Camembert. The various varieties of "cheese" alluded to may have some relation to the Norwegian Brunost or Gjetost, desribed as "cheese-related food", similar to Primost, hence Primula (food) and Dairylea (cheese). As an aside, has anyone tried making wolf cheese, honey badger cheese, or any of the more dangerous mammals? MinorProphet (talk) 16:29, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure that the cheese strings that I've encountered bear much relation to real mozzarella, it's industrial processed cheese of the type pioneered by Kraft, apparently known as American cheese but in the UK derided as "plastic cheese". Alansplodge (talk) 13:19, 8 March 2021 (UTC)