Processed cheese, Amer­i­can cheese, what­ever you call it, is the dol­lar store of cheeses. Sure, it tastes good on a grilled cheese or on top of a burger, but it’s the chicken nugget of cheese.

Processed cheese, accord­ing to the FDA, is a “food prod­uct” made from reg­u­lar cheese and some­times other unfer­mented dairy ingre­di­ents, plus emul­si­fiers, extra salt, and food col­or­ings. It was devel­oped as a way of staving off the usual per­isha­bil­ity that all foods have. Processed cheese has the capa­bil­ity to last almost indefinitely.

Wal­ter Ger­ber was the first per­son to invent processed cheese in 1911 in Thun, Switzer­land, but James L. Kraft (of Kraft Foods), see­ing that the cheese hadn’t been patented, applied for an Amer­i­can patent in 1916. In 1917 he sup­plied to the US Armed forces the first batch of Kraft canned cheese for sol­diers fight­ing in Europe dur­ing World War I. In addi­tion, the Kraft Com­pany also devel­oped a process for pro­duc­ing sliced processed cheese and a machine that indi­vid­u­ally wrapped slices of cheese. [1. The info for this post came from Kraft’s web­site and from Wikipedia]