Cheese lovers, unite! January 20 is National Cheese Lover’s Day, and it’s the perfect excuse for grabbing a slice, a hunk, or even a wheel of your favorite flavor of curdled milk. Wait, what? Is cheese just spoiled milk? No, not really… It’s made from milk that has been processed through a controlled fermentation process. It’s done by way of using special bacteria and enzymes that transform milk sugars, known as lactose, into lactic acid; the solids – curds – are separated from liquid – the whey – to create a stable product safe for human consumption.
Whether or not you came here for a science lesson about the food that entered the culinary picture around 7,000 years ago, you’re also probably expecting a tang of numismatics with this article. And don’t worry… That’s already fermenting in the background here as we dish on National Cheese Lover’s Day. But first, we’re going to take a look at the cheese scene in America, where about one-third of all milk products are destined for cheesedom – a multibillion-dollar industry that just seems to keep getting bigger and bigger. The U.S. produces about 2,000 different types of cheeses, with more than 600 types hailing from Wisconsin alone.
Wisconsin’s longheld nickname as “America’s Dairyland” is by no means hyperbolic. It’s quite factual. Wisconsin produced more than 3.5 billion pounds of cheese in 2022, which accounted for a full quarter – 25% – of the nation’s total cheese production that year. Wisconsin has been pulling such figures as the big cheese for years. And it’s this recognition as the nation’s largest producer of cheese that was first and foremost in the minds of coin designers who crafted the 2004 Wisconsin Quarter. The 30th state admitted to the Union, Wisconsin was honored in the 50 State Quarters program in 2004 with a bucolic design straight out of dairyland.
Alfred Maletsky’s design incorporates a visage of a dairy cow looking over a wheel of cheese and a stalk of corn, all of which are framed with a banner declaring “FORWARD,” the Wisconsin state motto. The design not only hearkens to the state’s moniker as “America’s Dairyland,” but it also places a wheel of cheese squarely on center stage, alongside its all-important – and critical – costar, the dairycow. The adjacent stalk of corn offers its own numismatic intrigue, as it spawned two of the most popular varieties of the 50 State Quarters series: the 2004-D Extra Leaf High and 2004-D Extra Leaf Low Wisconsin Quarters; each is worth many times more than their face value. And any of these Wisconsin Quarters provide coin collectors and cheese lovers alike with plenty of ways to “havarti” a “gouda” time on National Cheese Lover’s Day.