Science: Laboratory Cheese

One day when his flock became restive, a shepherd boy in 10th century France left his bread and goat's-milk cheese behind him in a cave near the village of Roquefort. Weeks later the boy came back to see what had become of his lunch. The bread was a lost cause, but the cheese was covered with green mold that proved highly edible. The result: mankind began eating Roquefort cheese.

Such happenstance methods of food manufacture, paralleled in the discoveries of other famous cheeses, have long been a challenge to modern scientific planners. At a meeting of the Illinois Dairy Products Association in Chicago, Professor Samuel T. Coulter, of the University of Minnesota's division of dairy husbandry, announced a brand new species of American cheese, sterile-fresh from the laboratory. Its name: nuworld cheese, "the first new cheese," according to Professor Coulter, "in modern times."

Nuworld got its start in 1949 when Dr. Stanley Knight, a bacteriologist at the University of Wisconsin, tried using ultraviolet light to irradiate cheese-starting materials, the bacteria cultures that are curdled in milk to give cheeses their individual flavors. Knight turned his findings over to University of Minnesota scientists, who began the job of making a new cheese. Their base was the shepherd boy's familiar mold, now called Penicillium roquejortii.

After extensive trials of their own, the Minnesota scientists turned their cheese over to a Wisconsin manufacturer for limited production. Since last July it has been on sale experimentally in Toledo (price: 39-50¢ for a 4-oz. package).

Nuworld (a generic, not a trade name) is a light, cream-colored cheese with little odor. Tasters describe it as "neither sharp nor mild, and not as bland and flat as American cheese." Cheese specialists agree that it is a distinctive cheese. Toledo buyers have been coming back for more.

Can scientists now produce new cheeses with the flick of an ultraviolet-ray machine? Cautioned the University of Wisconsin's Dr. William Hendrickson: "The chances are one in a million that you'd hit it right if you started out to create a new starting material for cheese." His conclusion: Knight, like the shepherd boy, was "darn lucky."