What Is Going on with CHEESE?
 

I put this thread here because it's not so much about cheese as the PRICE of cheese.

Hoffman's super sharp cheddar is NINE dollars a pound at Kroger.

Excuse me, but isn't that a bit much? and the 8 oz. foil package of cheese was five dollars!

Have I missed something? Is cheese now a rare commodity?

:cheese:

Have you looked at the price of milk lately?

here milk is - 2.50/gal...? I think. not so bad. Not nine-dollars-a-pound bad.

The peanut butter bubble is about to burst too. I hear on good authority one should stock up on peanut butter. (Well, my mom heard it from the grocery guy.)

They gotta get us somewhere: gas went down 15 cents and the evil corporations are starting to feel it in their collective pocket. Gawd forbid we start getting all cocky, saving money and buyin' other stuff besides food and gas, or just walkin' around with our extra dollar. The man is keeping us down. :tinfoil:

Oh, and I think the price of milk and cheese went up because there was a run on cows due to Dave's New Cheeseburger.

Come on, you didn't really think it was made out of DAVE, did you?

Pretty sure our regular milk is like $3.50/gallon. But we buy organic and that's a lot more. around $5.

Kinda pathetic that I don't know. We just buy it regardless of the price because it's a staple. It's a lot though.

I never thought about the dave's cheeseburger angle - food for thought!

oh, and glatt? Organic milk? really? What next - carob chip cookies?


;)

Yeah. I know. But then I did a blind taste test. Don't do a blind taste test if you want to keep drinking the regular less expensive milk.

you want I should send you some?.. we got more cheese here than you could shake a cow at.
:D

ME ME ME! I'm part swiss, and I want cheese! Not swiss cheese though. Bleh.

Do Swiss make Cheddar?

please !!¨.. wash your mouth out with cheese !!!.. the ONLY proper cheddah comes from England

and sorry if I'm being a bit pedantic... ALL cheese here is Swiss cheese :p:... "swiss cheese" as you know it is called Emmental ( from the area it started in )



ok /end pedantic

Then I don't want any. Cheese that smells like feet? No thanks.

I used to get a wonderful sharp white cheddar from New Zealand.

I usually don't pay attention to the price of individual things in the supermarket unless I am looking at the meat case ... I just figure that I need stuff, so I buy it. Okay, I occasionally play shelf-tag bingo and get the cheapest unit price out of a number of choices of a similar item.

But the other night I was in the store and suddenly noticed .... when the fuck did bread get to be $5 a loaf? I'm only buying that shit on sale from now on ... or I'll buy ingredients and make my own.

Cheese, on the other hand, is still doing okay. Kraft American (which I know is not really cheese, but makes a fine toasted cheese sandwich) is 2/$6. I stocked up (which means I forgot that I bought some two weeks ago and bought some more because I was shopping without a list), which is okay, because cheese is open dated and that stuff lasts close to forever.

I don't know what it is.. but Emmental is much milder than the "swiss cheese" I used to get in Boston ... must be the cows

I'm allergic to chocolate, so Mrs. Z will sometimes make me carob chip cookies. They're not bad if you can't have the real thing.

:facepalm:

I thought Bri said CARBO chip. I'm like, what, they ADD carbs?

Prices went up on everything and the contents of the packages got smaller. :mad:

And I'll take some Swiss cheese!:cheese:

They've been doing the smaller package size for years ... when was the last time you saw a pound of coffee?

But yeah, it is more pronounced now.

Remember when ice cream was sold in half gallons?

it's not`?

seriously

I mean it's not?

why, yes, grynch - I'd LOVE some cheese! :D

I just, frankly, am flabbergasted at how much I spend at the grocery and I DO coupon and I DO take advantage of sales and I TRY to watch it - it's me and my 20 year-old son, so it's not like I'm feeding four or five people. I just can't believe the prices. It's really disheartening to spend so much for so little. And I don't like feeling like a miser, but that's what I have to do to make it on my pittance of money.

I give you nine hundred and ninety-one more words:

I don't know what is going on with cheese, but it can't be gouda! :unsure:

thanks, I'll be here all week. try the cheese.

Well first they rounded off the edges a little bit and put a removable lid on top instead of that flap thing with the right angle corners, but they kept them half a gallon in size. They did that for a good decade or so, so we really got used to it. But then, with the rounded corners, they were able to just do a little more rounding, and put a little taper on the sides, and the top and height remained the same, but the size dropped down to 1.75 quarts. Then a year or two later, they rounded them off a bit more and increased the taper, and we're currently at 1.5 quarts.

Oh, here. I found a picture. Including one of the old folded cardboard cartons that was actually a half gallon.

Oh, c'mon. That was funny, IM. You should have left it.

I remember those folded cardboard ones. The were such a pain in the ass and so messy.

Our local Ice cream still comes in half gallons, it's about $5. but regularly goes on sale for $2.99

IT takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese.

I know a lot of dairy farmers. If you had to be a dairy farmer, or if you knew a dairy farmer, you'd wonder why milk is so cheap.

Most of the dairy farmers around here mostly sell milk at a loss. It makes no sense whatever. The price of milk is artificially set by the commodities market.

Dairy farming is hell.

I thought the first carton was with lactose. When I realized it's also lactose free I thought the joke would fizzle.

Thanks, though. :)

My really beautiful fashion plate niece is dating the son of a guy I went to HS with: dairy farmers. He's a great young man; we liken them to Green Acres. If they marry we will play that at the wedding.

But he works ALL THE TIME. Holidays: gotta go milk or whatever, the cows.

Cows don't know no holidays.

Yeah, you don't get to stop breastfeeding human babies on holidays either. Boobs of any species don't know no holidays.

haggis!

True, very true. Well, so I've herd.

Velveeta (I'm poor, and I have poor taste, wanna fight about it?), the bigger box - $5
Big loaf of bread - $2.50
Gallon of milk - $4 & up
Half a gallon of ice cream - is actually 1.75 qts???

Sonofa bitch!!

Thank heavens!

$2.50 a gallon = approx 19p per pint of milk. I pay 51p per pint here, and I look out of the window at the goddam cowses.

::eating smoked dutch gouda right now::

Trader Joe's $4.99lb. it's not as nice as usual though. :(

Milk here is $2.50-$3/gallon, and we get through 6-9 gallons a week. I can't even begin to tell you how much cheese we consume, but suffice to say, when it's on sale, I buy about 20lb. In half pound sealed blocks and bags of pregrated. Kroger Colby Jack mostly. Yeah, I know, but speed is of the essense sometimes -we're "eat-to-live" people.

you pay a lot more if you buy it by the pint. And don't forget our gallons are smaller.

Ummmmmm... Emmental. My most favorite cheese in the world. My Mom was Swiss and grew up in the Emmental in the teensy village of Fluhli. We used to go back for visits and I remember those truly huge wheels of cheese in the places that made Emmental. And the flavor! If there was some way you could send it, I would pay you. Alas, I don't think you can send cheese through the mail. :(

She better talk to some dairy farmer's wives. Around here at weddings and funerals and graduations, etc. The dairy farmer families attend events in shifts, each group looking after all the cows for a while.

It is 24/7/365. Only dairy farmers marry dairy farmers. Other folks just don't get it.

Or maybe they do.

I can hear it now "Hey Monkey, you told Niece WHAT? Not to marry that nice young man? How dare you! What is wrong with you?"

I think she likes the gentleman farmer thing, too. The family name is a name that dates back to "the first white child born in Blah Blah county." She's a girly-girl, but she's got her head on straight.

And he IS the nicest young man. :)

There's just the two of us here. We get through about four (English) pints a week. You can't buy anything bigger than that in our local shops. I was just too lazy to check the four-pint price, but now I've gone through the bin for the receipt and I can tell you it's £1.54 for four pints (= +/- $2.43). Twice the price.

IM just tell your niece to watch out for Katrina Von Tassel.

I hear guys lose their heads over her!

:lol:

Limey, we buy filtered milk.
It's slightly more expensive but it lasts much longer.
Dad has semi-skimmed, but Mum and I can use skimmed together just on cereal, and my one cup of tea per morning, and make it last three weekks.

I was in the local shop this afternoon.
Mr Shah was having a business discussion with either a rep or a Londis area manager or somesuch. He was protesting about the price of pasta, saying he was going to lose trade.

Rep/ manager man said every outlet would face the same issue due to the price of wheat.
That's the first time I've heard something like that away from Shock! Horror! Blame Wayne Rooney! headlines. Am thinking of advising the 'rents to stock up now...

Sundae, we buy filtered milk too. I'm sorry to say that in my experience the local milk goes off so quickly (frequently before you've opened the one pint carton and before its sell-by date) that I've abandoned it.
The ice-cream, however, is to die for!

Two litres (half gallon) of milk over here (if you buy a name brand off the shelf) is about $3. If you want to buy A2 (which is pure jersey milk and better for you) you're looking at about $5 and organic is over $6 for the same amount.

Cheese is an expensive luxury which we still make room for in the budget. For a 1kg block it's about $11. That's 2lb and is just basic cheddar or colby. Nothing fancy.

Icecream is about $8/gallon.

Au dollars are comparable with US at the moment, so that's a pretty even comparison.

I get the shits every time I have to go shopping. lol

Have you ever heard of 'Milk Wars'?

The big supermarkets over here have their own home brand lable for milk, and a year or so ago, they started competing by dropping the prices of their home brand milk down to $1/litre. They did the same with bread by making it $1/loaf.

While this is good for the consumer, it's not so great for the farmers. I feel sorry enough for dairy farmers. As it is, I reckon they have the shitties type of farmer job you could have because of the hours they're stuck with and so forth, but they run on a pretty tight budget already. If their contracts are renewed at lower prices, can they afford to continue? Possibly not, which means that if the inevitable knock on effect goes ahead, this bubble is going to burst big time and we're all going to wish we could afford to drink milk.

Maybe you're lactose-intolerant.

lol....nice, but no.

It's amazing how many people are though.

The gene for lactose tolerance is the recent mutation in our general species. Lactose intolerance is far more prevalent worldwide.

(Though it's also important to note that aged cheeses have no lactose in them, because it's a sugar that's all been fermented out by the cheese-making cultures. Soft cheeses like mozzarella still contain a certain amount of lactose.)

That's pretty cheap for cheese... but I guess they more than make it up on ice cream. :yelgreedy

Just asked my wife. Regular milk is $3.99/gallon, and organic is $5.99/gallon. Worse than I thought.

Yeah well, I still think it's a crazy price to pay for something we eat every day around here. Having the kids makes a difference. If it was just me and Dazza, we'd only be buying small amounts, or larger amounts would last longer.

These boys can go through a kg in a week without any trouble at all. That's a huge wack of the grocery bill, which is why I've put the stops on all the cheese gobbling. We're back to just plain eating now. It helps. lol

The quantity makes a huge price diff here. it's crazy. If it's 2.50 for a gallon, it's usually around 2 for a half gallon and -if you can get a pint -1.50 to 1.75

And it NEVER goes off. Unless you buy it from CVS.....not that we give it a chance to any more.....

Wow, milk that doesn't go off? I wouldn't be drinking that if you paid me. lol

Sounds like a nice little home business.

What?


I buy organic whole milk at $4.50 for 2 litres.

sounds like a porno i'd like to star in!

"I don't care what it smells like - get in there!"

Tescos sells standard milk at .52p per/litre. Since there's something like 3.8 litres to an American gallon that would work out at around £2.04 per/US gallon. Which is around $3.20

Now compare our cheese, please.
I need to know whether it is cheaper to buy mature cheddar here or there.
This could make the difference as to whether I up sticks and marry Sarge.

What? I should do it myself?
Ah well in that case I'm staying here - far too complicated a sum...

Geeze, poor Sarge will be sad when he sees the main reason you're not going to run into his loving arms are a few sums!

You're a wicked woman!!!