The cheese that sparked a protest movement
I cannot stand cottage cheese. I was sure I was the only one in the country, but in the course of writing this article I found the only other person not to like it.
For in Israel, cottage cheese, or just “cottage,” as it’s known here, rules. It is home, it is childhood, it is our past, present and future dreams, and it is absolutely everywhere.
In honor of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which is celebrated this Thursday and marked by eating copious amounts of dairy delights (hello there, delicious cheesecake!), we set out to get the lowdown on the most Israeli cheese of all.
“The history of cottage cheese in Israel is very extensive and is related to many social, economic and political issues,” explains Michal Levit, a big cottage lover who is the public programs and library manager at Asif, a culinary institute and NGO dedicated to cultivating Israel’s food culture.
“It’s one of my favorite things in the world, and I learned how to eat it from my big sister. I have a slice of bread with thin pieces of avocado with salt and lemon, and then cottage cheese on top of that,” she excitedly tells ISRAEL21c.
“It’s been an inseparable part of the food culture in Israel and the food culture in the kibbutzim, where every dining room tray was laden with a fresh cow’s milk cheese,” she says, referring to gevina levana (white cheese).
“So its popularity has a lot to do with the fact that Israelis have loved fresh cheese from the very beginning of Israeliness.”
Containers of Tnuva “white cheese.” Photo by Igal Vaisman via Shutterstock.com
While gevina levana was always here, the seemingly omnipresent cottage cheese — with all its lumps — only made aliyah years after Israel’s establishment, in 1962.
A gamble that paid off
According to Tnuva, the Israeli dairy giant responsible for introducing Israelis to cottage cheese, one of the firm’s managers spent a few months in the early Sixties in the United States, where he happened to…
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