It's a story about marketing, economics, science, and biology.

And most importantly, it's about why a lot of cheese is orange.

Cheese making basically starts here.

I know, it seems like we're starting a little bit early on in the process, but hang in there with me.

Animals like cows, buffalo, goats, sheep, they naturally eat grass, which gives them the nutrients they need to produce milk, and that milk gets turned into cheese.

That is one vascular utter, by the way.

In the 12 and 1300s, sheep were often the main producers of milk, but the catch was that… A sheep can turn their grass intake into either wool or milk, but not the same amount of both simultaneously.

That's Paul Kinston, former president of the American Dairy Science Association and a multi-published author on the subject of cheese.

Cheese, right from undergraduate work, you know, and then through graduate school, became my love, my first love.

And talking about love, just hold on one second.

And talking about love, if you love Vox content as much as Paul loves cheese and I love french fries, then you should know about our membership program.

It's the best way to support our journalism and get some exclusive perks.

Please pardon my eating while I explain this, I've been filming all day and haven't had a chance to have a snack.

So weeks of work go into the making of every Vox video, and that goes from mother.

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Now back to the video.

Switching the milk used for cheese from this to this had a profound effect on people's perception of cheese, all because of something in the grass, beta carotene.

Beta carotene is a complex compound that creates color.

It's what gives carrots and apricots and sweet potatoes their signature orange.

Grass, when it's lush and green and in season, contains beta carotene.

When sheep process the beta carotene in grass, it doesn't make its way into the milk.

Therefore, sheep cheese is pretty much always naturally white.

In the cow, it's a different metabolic pathway.

Beta carotene goes into the cow, passes into the milk, is part of the fat in milk, and then gets concentrated in the cheese.

And that's what gives cow's milk cheese its yellow color.

Cheese made in sort of the spring, early summer, always has been recognized as really yellow, which it is, and also higher in quality.

I mean, it was always revered.

Because of that, people really wanted yellow cheese.

But cheesemakers, they wanted to make money.

And a second change in terms of marketing that happened that became really important, cow's milk forms cream easily.

So cheesemakers figured out pretty quickly that they could skim off some cream before making cheese to make butter.

Butter had a better price in the marketplace.

But the problem with the cheese was, with less cream, is less beta carotene carrying over because it's in the butter.

And so it didn't look as good.

Farmers were ending up with yellow butter and pale cheese.

But they realized that they could scam the system by dyeing the cheese to look like it was full of that beta carotene-filled fat.

So that begins to happen in the 1400s, 1500s.

And they used things like saffron or marigold or, believe it or not, carrot juice.

But everything changed once these bad boys hit the market.

The annatto seed.

The seed comes from this shrub that grows in South America.

The Dutch, who followed in the wake of the Spanish colonizers as traders, learned about annatto, and they saw markets.

So in the 1600s, they began to export annatto from South America to Europe.

Because there aren't a lot of really good colorants available.

And Europe is getting very wealthy, and they like colorful things.

And so it didn't take long for cheesemakers to realize they could replace these expensive colorants like saffron or marigold or carrot juice because they're not very intense.

And annatto was superior and cheap.

And cheeses then began to be either surface applied with annatto like the Dutch did for to make English hard-pressed cheeses like Cheshire and Cheddar look like they were from rich spring milk, you know, full of beta-carotene.

So the coloring was for marketing.

And this then becomes the tradition.

Over centuries, this is the way, you know, real cheese is made.

And that's why today you still get cheeses that look like this.

With factory farming, cows aren't as grass-fed as they used to be.

Their diets tend to include a lot more corn and soy.

But because we've been used to centuries of saturated colors of cheese, none of that really matters when it comes to marketing.

We still expect our cheddar to maintain a golden hue.

And you can still thank annatto for that.

Annatto is used all over food too, often making its way into many other cheese adjacent snacks, all of which carry on that long orange legacy.

But if you go to your local grocery store, you'll see that the cheese is varied.

Take this cheddar, for instance.

There's the yellow dyed cheddar that we expect.

And then there's the undyed white cheddar.

But if you go to your local cheesemonger, you might be able to find the perfect in-between, grass-fed cheddar cheese that's naturally tinted with beta-carotene.

Which one you prefer is up to your own taste and expectations.

I grew up with white Vermont cheddar as a kid.

I prefer raw milk cheddar, by the way.

I live right down the road from a wonderful raw milk cheddar cheesemaker.

My kids grew up on it.

It's pricey, but boy, it's good.

And it's not colored.