Vegetarian Cheese For Your Diet Plan

by annthrop

Vegetarian Cheese For Your Diet Plan

These days, it’s getting simple to find vegetarian dishes, even vegan, substitutes to products like burgers, milks, and sausage, and now even cheeses are available in vegetarian and vegan varieties. A lot of vegetarians don’t consider that some of the cheeses they are eating could actually contain unfamiliar animal ingredients. That’s right cheese, a common staple in many healthful vegetarian diets, is often made with rennet or rennin, which is used to coagulate the dairy product.

A vital ingredient in the production of most commercial cheeses is an enzyme that comes from the lining of the stomach of calves, called rennet. At times an enzyme from pigs is also used. Clearly, this is of concern to vegetarians, since these are products that came from slaughtered animals. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, `rennet’ is in fact the lining of the fourth stomach of calves and other young ruminants, but this term is also used to refer to the enzyme that is removed from the stomach of lining for use in making cheese. ‘Rennin’ is another term for this enzyme, although it is less usually used. These enzymes are essential because they are the ingredients that cause milk to coagulate and in the long run become cheese.

Now, there is no way that vegetarians cannot enjoy eating cheese because there is an alternative for it, the vegetarian cheeses that are made with rennet of non-animal origin. Advances in genetic engineering techniques mean that a few vegetarian cheeses may now be made using chymosin produced by genetically engineered micro-organisms. The genetic material (DNA) which encodes for chymosin is introduced into a micro-organism which can then be cultured to produce viable quantities of chymosin. This is by means of taking out genetic material from calf a stomach cell which acts as a template for producing the chymosin encoding DNA. This can now then be introduced into the micro-organism. As the genetic material is introduced there is no further need for calf cells. Then again, the chymosin encoding DNA can be bio-synthesised in the laboratory without the use of calf cells.

The chymosin produced is the same to that produced by calf stomach cells. The development of genetically engineered chymosin has been encouraged by deficiency and fluctuations in cost of rennet from calves. Its manufacturers claim that genetically engineered chymosin will stop the cheese making industry’s reliance on the slaughter of calves.

Chymosin encoding DNA has been introduced into three dissimilar micro-organisms. It includes the yeast Kluyveromyces lactis, the fungus Aspergillus niger var awamori, and a strain of the bacteria Escherichia coli. There is no legal condition for manufacturers to state whether genetically engineered rennet has been used in the cheese making process.

Vegetarian cheeses are now usually available in supermarkets, grocery stores and health food stores. A large variety of cheeses are now made with non-animal rennet and labeled as suitable for vegetarians. No particular type of cheese is totally vegetarian. So include cheese to your vegetarian diet plans!

Enjoy becoming a vegetarian!

Happy eating!

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