This news affects every pizza slice that warms your palette… every soothing bite of a grilled cheese sandwich….  every taco that crunches under tooth.

The price of cheese has gone insane.

You probably had no idea… but the cheese market works just like the crude oil market.   The only difference… one commodity ends up in your tank… the other in your mouth.

The NY Times reports For oil… the benchmark is West Texas Intermediate Crude.  In the cheese biz… the benchmark is cheddar.   Traders scream buy ..sell.. sell ..sell… on the floor of  the Chicago Mercantile Exchange …trading 40-thousand pound truckloads of mild cheddar.

That’s a lotta mac and Cheese. 

The benchmark is a 40-pound wheel of chedder… which is kind of like a *barrel* of oil.  .

So during the pandemic restaurants closed…. and the price of cheddar plummeted to a buck a pound.  A record low.  Grilled Cheese for everybody.  Then  the supply chain got screwed up… and prices have now whipsawed to $2.80 a pound in a couple of short months.

This is the stuff that will eventually wreck a family budget.

If you say “I don’t eat cheddar"  Every other cheese variety is priced based on that quote for wheel of young, mild, cheddar.

If you want to save some cheddar… the one cuisine that never uses cheese…. is Chinese food.

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