The Problem with Cheese: How Pfizer Hijacked Cheese Without Asking
Updated
Most Americans assume that they know what they’re eating. They glance at their grilled cheese, lasagna, pizza, and yummy morning omelet sprinkled with cheddar, and think: ahhh … cheese. Simple, wholesome, and a staple for many families that has been around since biblical times. But what the cheese manufacturer didn’t put on the label is that there’s a decent chance that the cheese at hand was made using genetically modified organisms, courtesy of Big Pharma’s favorite overachiever, Pfizer. And, again, most consumers probably had no idea.
Let’s rewind. Traditional rennet, the enzyme that transforms liquid milk into solid cheese, comes from the stomach lining of nursing calves. Rennet produced this way has been the gold standard for thousands of years because, well, it works. The process is straightforward: slaughter a calf for veal, harvest the abomasum (the fourth stomach chamber), extract the enzyme chymosin, and you’ve got yourself rennet. Indeed, this is not exactly a pleasant dinner conversation—or even thought, for that matter—but at least it’s honest. And least we knew what we were getting.
Yet, here comes Pfizer in the 1980s. Not entirely content to simply peddle pills, Pfizer decided the cheese industry needed some “disrupting.” The company’s stated reasoning for this upheaval was noble enough on the surface. Pfizer proclaimed that animal rennet was expensive, supply was limited, and with the growing demand for cheese, something must change. So Pfizer’s scientists isolated the gene responsible for producing chymosin, stuck it into bacteria, and created what they called fermentation-produced chymosin, or FPC.
Following Pfizer’s patented manipulative lab work, in 1990, the FDA rubber-stamped the Big Pharma giant’s GMO rennet as the first genetically engineered food ingredient approved for human consumption, granting it the status of “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS). The FDA declared it to be substantially equivalent to calf-derived rennet, allowing it to enter the market without special labeling. The deception is as simple as that. Revolutionary, they said. Efficient, they promised. Safe, they assured us.
But it’s way past time that we talk about what Pfizer didn’t say out loud. Their intentional disruption wasn’t about feeding the world or making cheese accessible to the masses. Not at all. Instead, it was about controlling a market. By the late 1990s, roughly sixty percent of American hard cheeses were made with Pfizer’s dangerous FPC. Today? That number has ballooned to ninety percent globally. Ninety percent. Shockingly, that means nearly every slice of cheese consumed over the last two decades likely contains this genetically modified enzyme, whether we consented to it or not, and despite most people not even knowing it existed. And there are no studies to find out how our bodies have reacted to this fake ingredient.
Now, the industry will tell you FPC is “identical” to animal rennet. The powers that be insist that Pfizer’s concocted rennet is technically, chemically, and molecularly the same as rennet from a cow. And perhaps that’s true in a sterile lab where everything behaves exactly as predicted. But here’s the real problem. Humans don’t live in a lab. We live in bodies, complex ecosystems where even minor changes can have dangerous cascading effects on the delicate balance of nature within us that won’t be understood for decades. And like many of Pfizer’s destructive products, long-term studies are virtually nonexistent. And transparency? Well, that is laughable. There is no mention of “genetically modified rennet” on any cheese ingredient list. Instead, consumers will find “enzymes” or “microbial enzymes” if they’re lucky, which sounds vague enough to mean nothing of concern to most.
By now, we know this is the standard playbook that has been crafted to keep us unwell. The plot is simple. In this case, Pfizer created a bogus problem, offered a solution, profited from both ends, all while throwing the consequences out the window. Why? Because they intend to treat (and profit from) those, too. Big Pharma, Big Ag, and their comrades in regulatory agencies have perfected the art of keeping us just sick enough, just dependent enough, just ignorant enough to keep the machine humming. Indeed, they desperately strive to swap out real food for Franken-ingredients, tout the cost savings and efficiency, throw in the perils of climate change, and by the time society wises up, it’s too late. The infrastructure is entrenched. The profits are banked. And we’re left holding the bag, or in this case, the GMO cheese.
What’s particularly appalling with Pfizer’s rennet scandal is how it framed this shift in cheese as progress. Make no mistake: Pfizer wasn’t solving world hunger; it was solving its own bottom line. Traditional rennet worked fine for millennia, but it didn’t come with patents and licensing fees. It didn’t allow one corporation to dominate the global supply chain. FPC did. And so here we are, living in a world where ninety percent of our cheese is made with a genetically engineered enzyme cooked up by billion-dollar Pfizer in a bacterial fermentation tank. Again, this occurred because efficiency overshadows tradition, and profit overshadows precaution.
The most insidious part? The masses have been conditioned not to ask questions. A quick mention of GMOs at a dinner party and surely eyes will roll. Take the conversation a bit further and suggest that maybe, just maybe, humanity should have been consulted before our food supply was fundamentally altered, and you will most likely be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or a freak. But hold on. This perspective isn’t paranoia. It is pattern recognition. And more importantly, it is understanding that corporations like Pfizer, which have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, not citizens, absolutely do not have our best interests at heart. Nope. Instead, they have their quarterly earnings reports at heart.
Pfizer’s fermentation-produced chymosin isn’t an isolated case. It’s proof of a larger, more sinister concept at play. Still, Pfizer’s cheese ploy demonstrates that Big Pharma can genetically engineer a foundational ingredient, slip it into the food supply with minimal oversight, obscure it with vague labeling, and the public will swallow it without question. Literally. And now, decades later, FPC is so ubiquitous that opting out isn’t even realistic for most people. To do so requires hunting down artisanal cheese makers using traditional rennet, paying a premium, and hoping they’re telling the truth.
Thankfully, exposure to the corruption is underway, but for now, this is the world Big Pharma and its enablers have created. Specifically, their tyrannical world is one in which chronic illness is the norm, our food is largely toxic and engineered rather than being wholesome and locally grown, massive profits supersede individual health, and asking questions makes you the problem. Pfizer’s fake rennet has been around since 1990, quietly colonizing your cheese plate, and most people still don’t know it exists. That is not by accident. That is the plan, so pay attention.
We must always dig deeper in knowing where our food comes from. With artificial rennet exposed, the next time we reach for a block of cheddar, we must ask: what else are we not being told? What else has been swapped out, engineered, modified, and sold back to us under the guise of progress? Because if they can do it with cheese and get away with it, they can do it with anything.
