Reading between the lines here: the American cheese “product” isn’t very good, and consumer tastes have shifted. Also, I assume the dairy industry is heavily subsidized by the US govnerment?
American cheese is cheap. And when you have an oversupply of milk, you have to either dump it or turn it into something that can be stored for later sale. Thus cheap cheese.
As a french, I'm sometimes offended by what Americans call "cheese".
If I'd wanted to make a non-dairy pizza, I'd just remove the cheese and find other interesting ingredients. The world is too vast and beautiful to eat what the Americans call cheese.
American Cheese is fantastic! Kraft Singles American however is trash and I hate that I have to explain the difference or that some people think that's what all American Cheese is like.
If you look carefully, it's not actually called "American cheese". It's usually something like "American slices (pasteurized processed cheese product)" instead.
The wine lake and butter Mountain came in for a lot of flak, some of it relating to US/EU trade wars. The Uruguay round put most of that to bed. the thing with US national cheese is there's two parts to the story:
There's the part about the economics, subsidy to dairy farming, the importance of the rural vote and consequently the political inability to remove the supports.
Then there's the other part. About how most Europeans think this cheese is disgusting solidified axle grease and gives dairy farming a bad name.
I'm in a middle ground on this. I like snacking on junk food, so US national cheese is fine with me, in context. That context is a hoagy or cheese melt on rye, or a sub.
But if you actually like cheese, this stuff is bad juju.
Economics might hate price support but a hollowed out rural sector is hillbilly elegy on steroids. Maybe this is the price which had to be paid. But jeez, you think they could make parmesan or something, not just solid train lube.
Keep in mind, we're talking about generalizations; my experience doesn't serve as definitive proof against a wide and lazy generalization of Americans and their cheese knowledge.
There's a bit more to it. What most identify as American "Cheese" is the Kraft Single or its equivalent competitors, a product without enough cheese in it (< 51%) to even legally label as cheese, and per the FDA at least is not legally "American Cheese". It must be labeled as a cheese "food" or "product". But the branding emphasizes American, Singles, and Calcium, the rest is the fine print.
There are higher quality actual American Cheeses, that can actually call themselves cheese unqualified, brands such as Kretshcmar, Boar's Head, etc. Kraft does make a somewhat lower end version under the Deli Deluxe label. They are produced from a combination of Cheddar and Colby.
But its not just gatekeeping there is a wide latitude in the quality and constitution of the various products marketed as "American" cheese ..., some of them don't contain any milk! This type of market segmentation isn't as common with better quality cheese varieties for a number of reasons. At the extreme the "American" label gets put on dollar store imitation "cheese" singles. Whereas I don't know of much imitation provolone sold anywhere.
And mass-produced has little to do with it. Most deli cheeses are mass produced but people tend to have strong preferences for alternatives to American irrespective.
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