Cheese
% 
| |
|---|---|
| Name | cheese |
| Base price | 17 zm |
| Nutrition | 250 |
| Turns to eat | 2 |
| Weight | 2 |
| Conduct | vegetarian |
Cheese is a type of fleshy comestible that appears in SLASH'EM, SpliceHack, SlashTHEM, and Hack'EM.
Generation
In addition to random generation, cheese can be found in delicatessen shops.
Description
Eating cheese confers 250 nutrition. Despite being fleshy, cheese is vegetarian.[1]
Cheese can be used to tame the various rats encountered in the dungeon by throwing it at them, which may be the reason it is considered fleshy.[2]
Strategy
At a weight of 2 aum, cheese has a nutrition/weight ratio second only to the lembas wafer, and non-vegan characters may consider it worth hanging on to. Cheese may also have some corner uses in taming rats, e.g. to avoid a potential death as a pacifist.
Origin
Cheese is a dairy product produced in a range of flavors, textures, and forms by acidifying milk and adding particular enzymes in order to separate the milk into solid curds and liquid whey, before pressing them into finished cheese. Some cheeses have aromatic molds on the rind, the outer layer, or throughout the product. Over a thousand types exist, with their styles, textures and flavors depending on the origin of the milk (including the animal's diet), whether they have been pasteurised, the butterfat content, the bacteria and mold, the processing, and how long they have been aged.
Cheese in the pre-modern age was generally made using rennet, a set of enzymes produced in the stomachs of calves and other ruminant mammals - the rennet is what separates milk into solid curds and liquid whey. In modern times, most cheese is now made using chymosin from bacterial sources, with less than 5% of cheese in the US made using rennet - this may be the basis for the vegetarian status of cheese in SLASH'EM and other variants.
Cheese is valued for its portability, long shelf life, and high content of fat, protein, calcium, and phosphorus - while it has a longer shelf life than milk, how long a cheese will keep depends on the type: Hard cheeses, such as Parmesan, last longer than soft cheeses, such as Brie or goat's milk cheese. Vacuum packaging of block-shaped cheeses and gas-flushing of plastic bags with mixtures of carbon dioxide and nitrogen are used for storage and mass distribution of cheeses in the 21st century.
