With the Velveeta shortage in LBN: The day they took the Cheese out of Cheez Whiz

[Omaha Steve]

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/03/09/michael-moss-the-day-they-took-the-cheese-out-of-cheez-whiz/

Michael Moss, Special to National Post | March 9, 2013

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In the last of a three-part book excerpt, Michael Moss explains how the rise of ‘pseudo-cheese’ is driving an explosion in obesity.

Dean Southworth was enjoying a quiet retirement in Florida after 38 years as a food scientist for Kraft. He and his wife, Betty, were living in a modest house in the palm-lined island town of Fort Myers Beach, smack between the inlet that runs to Estero Bay, with its luscious sunrises, and the Gulf of Mexico, with its magnificent sunsets. Southworth, finally, had the time to take in both. During his years at Kraft, he had spent long days trying to develop new products, trying to stay ahead of the competition. Now, he did things like take long walks and help run the local Kiwanis Club.

He hadn’t abandoned his previous life completely, though. Whenever he got the urge, which was quite often, he would enjoy the fruits of one of his finest inventions: the spread known as Cheez Whiz.

Southworth had been part of the team that created Cheez Whiz in the early 1950s. The mission had been to come up with a speedy alternative to the cheese sauce used in making Welsh rarebit, a popular but laborious dish that required a half-hour or more of cooking before it could be poured over toast. It took them a year and a half of sustained effort to get the flavor right, but when they did, they succeeded in creating one of the first megahits in convenience foods. Southworth and his wife, Betty, became lifelong fans and made it part of their daily routine. “We used it on toast, muffins, baked potatoes,” he told me. “It was a nice spreadable, with a nice flavor. And it went well at night with crackers and a little martini. It went down very, very nicely, if you wanted to be civilized.”

So it was with considerable alarm that he turned to his wife one evening in 2001, having just sampled a jar of Cheez Whiz he’d picked up at the local Winn-Dixie supermarket. “I said, ‘Holy God, it tastes like axle grease.’ I looked at the label and I said, ‘What the hell did they do?’ I called up Kraft, using the 800 number for consumer complaints, and I told them, ‘You are putting out a goddamn axle grease!’ ”

FULL story at link.

[Jenoch]

1. We always had a jar of Cheez Whiz on hand when I was a kid.

My mother liked it on crackers. She also had a cheesey potatoes recipie that used it. A few years ago I made that potato recipe and it was not as good as I remembered. Now I know why.

[Omaha Steve]

2. We always had cheez whiz in the house too

But that was the old recipe 40-50 years ago.

OS

[Jenoch]

3. I would probably still use it in my mother's

cheesey potatoes recipie if they had not changed the ingredients.

I would still use Velveeta and Hormel Hot Chili No Beans if I wanted a dip recipe for Super Bowl Sunday.