I still consider fermented foods such as yogurt, cheese, and sauerkraut to be whole
foods. Natural processes of fermentation are everywhere. Milk wants to be cheese
and sour cream: it starts to sour soon after it exits the animal unless properly
refrigerated and handled. Cultures aid the transformation.

That is the origin story of cheese: probably discovered millennia ago by
some traveler in the Middle East who set off for the day carrying milk …

in the handy container of a calf or sheep stomach, and found at the end of her journey that it
had turned into something quite different, and quite tasty—curdled into the
beginning of cheese by the rennet coagulant naturally in the animal’s stomach.

No mountains mined, no massive transport vehicles needed to make this delicious
food—“making” cheese this way just means helping milk do its thing. That’s the
kind of processing I can get behind as a FoodWISE consumer.