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Comment by alangpierce | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, parmesan cheese is traditionally made using rennet from the stomach lining of calves, so it's not vegetarian, but thanks to GMOs, most parmesan cheese in the US is vegetarian-friendly since the rennet can be produced in a lab without killing calves [1]. There are also plenty of startups using genetic engineering to make vegan/vegetarian alternative meats. So while there's certainly a lot of overlap between vegans and anti-GMO people, it seems like it's probably counterproductive to dismiss GMOs entirely if you actually care about animal welfare.

[1]: https://io9.gizmodo.com/you-can-thank-genetic-engineering-fo...

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There's no such thing as US parmesan. Parmesan has PDO/DOP status and can only be made by wizened old men who've never travelled further than 12 miles from their picturesque place of birth in italy.

You can make "parmesan style hard cheese" but it's not the same. Grana padano is not parmesan, and that's PDO/DOP too

>wizened old men who've never travelled further than 12 miles from their picturesque place of birth in italy.

...or a dairy product megafactory in Italy proper, not unlike many in the US.

>there's certainly a lot of overlap between vegans and anti-GMO people

Yea, these are good points.

Just to be precise, rennet was needed in basically all cheese making with just few exceptions, it was not just parmesan.

Correct, we make cheddar and Colby cheese and both need rennet. I can't think of any hard cheese that doesn't need rennet, in fact. Also, the rennet we use is bacterially produced, no calves were killed to make it.

Interestingly, most cheeses that don't use rennet are soft, but some of the hardest of all cheeses are the Mongolian cheeses Bayaslag and aaruul. Both are rock hard, but use acid to coagulate the proteins instead of rennet. They are often consumed after soaking in tea, or are sucked on, not chewed. Their shelf life is apparently over years long.

Just found that earlier today after doing some research inspired by this thread.

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