Why Is American Cheese Orange?

Peel the plastic off a slice of American cheese and it's bright orange. But cheese is made from milk, and milk is white. So where did the orange come from? The answer involves a rainforest tree, a possible trick played on cheese buyers, a poison that once hid in the colour, and a fight over butter that reached the US Supreme Court. In this video: why cheese changes colour with the seasons, the tree called annatto and the Indigenous peoples who used it first, the "fake rich cheese" theory, whether orange means sharper or older (it doesn't), the first American cheese factory in 1851, how processed cheese and wrapped slices took over the name "American cheese", the red lead scare in nineteenth-century cheese, the margarine colour wars and pink laws, and what the 2025 move away from synthetic dyes means for orange cheese. Sources Wikipedia: Annatto; American cheese; Processed cheese; Kraft Singles; Red Leicester; Cheshire cheese NPR (2013): How 17th Century Fraud Gave Rise to Bright Orange Cheese; University of West London: Why are some cheeses orange? Culture Cheese Magazine: Jesse Williams and the first American cheese factory; annatto in cheese Frederick Accum, A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820) Smithsonian Magazine and Science History Institute: the Oleomargarine Acts and the butter wars; National Geographic: The Butter Wars Collins v. New Hampshire, 171 U.S. 30 (1898) (Justia) Cornell LII: 21 CFR 73.30, 133.169, 133.173; FDA: Color Additives History; FDA tracker of pledges to remove petroleum-based dyes Stateline: West Virginia food dye law (2025) #cheese #foodhistory #explained #americanfood #history