Inventions & Discoveries · Farming and food
Cheese
Cheese is a food made by curdling milk. It was probably first made by accident, when milk was stored in bladders made of ruminants' stomachs, whose rennet curdles it. The earliest direct evidence is holed clay sieves more than seven thousand years old, from Kujawy in Poland and the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, where residues suggest cheese. Sumerian cuneiform texts of the Third Dynasty of Ur record it, remains were found in an Egyptian tomb of about 2900 BCE, the first cheese factory opened in Switzerland in 1815, and Jesse Williams began assembly-line production in New York in 1851.
On the inventions tree
- First known
- over 7,000 years ago
- Where
- Kujawy, Poland
NoteHoled pottery from pile-dwellings on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland, roughly eight thousand years old, is thought to come from cheese strainers; where cheese-making began is not known.
See also
Cite this entry
- APA
- The Epoch Institute. (2026). Cheese. In The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/cheese
- MLA
- “Cheese.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia, The Epoch Institute, 2026, https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/cheese. Accessed .
- Chicago
- The Epoch Institute. “Cheese.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. 2026. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/cheese.
- Harvard
- The Epoch Institute (2026) ‘Cheese’, The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. Available at: https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/cheese (Accessed: ).
Last reviewed October 2026Random entry ↻