Is this a promotion for the National Cheese Stockpile?[1] The US has about 1.5 billion pounds of cheese in storage in a cave in Missouri. Really. There's a USDA welfare program for dairy farmers, and they have to put the excess milk somewhere. So it's made into cheese and stored.
Random example. I buy a meal made by a professional chef and have it delivered. It's more convenient and it's a much better meal than I could make. It's more expensive, sure, but that's not 'in every way'
You mentioned a chef which is less specific but I generally consider restaurant food less healthy than what I'd cook for myself due to differing incentives which is another dimension for convenience
My exception was to the terms "always" and "in every way".
For instance, I buy way more shredded cheese than blocks. It removes an annoying step that creates a dirty utensil that isn't trivial to clean (grater). If I'm making 3 quesadillas a day for picky children to eat at different snack or mealtimes, I don't want to own 3 shredders, nor to have to carefully scrub the cheese off it 3x per day.
I haven't noticed any important difference in the cheese besides saving me like 15 minutes a day of fussing with cheese graters.
However, I would recommend grating a block for a couple days worth at a time and keeping it in the fridge in a food storage container. That way you don't need 3 shredders or to spend all your time cleaning shredders every time you want a quesadilla. An electric rotary shredder or a kitchen-aide attachment makes it trivial.
Also, try adding a little canned Red Enchilada sauce to your quesadilla or egg and cheese burritos. It's life changing!
That's just an enchilada. They're good, but they're not quesadillas.
I make quesadillas in the microwave. You don't need to grate the cheese; slicing is just as good.
This assumes you're using corn tortillas; I assume flour tortillas don't microwave well.
I'm starting to wonder if
convenience = 1/healthy
If something is shelf stable, that’s because the bacteria can’t or won’t eat it. If bacteria doesn’t want to eat something, it’s not food. And you probably don’t want it in your stomach.
Some things are shelf stable by physically keeping the bacteria out of it (eg canned food). That seems fine. But how do they make shelf stable cheesy / creamy products? Bacteria loves cheese. They do it with weird additives and substitutes that - by design - bacteria hates. But that also means our bodies can’t really eat it either - since we use the same bacteria in our stomach to digest things.
Plenty of healthy things are convenient. Like, apples! But healthy food is rarely shelf stable. Almost by definition.
Granted, you can’t do that with shredded cheese. which is why it has to be refrigerated and will eventually go bad.
Your body will do a lot of work on food before it is in the end absorbed. It adds enzymes that break up molecular bonds. It will use acid on it. You will mash it with physical energy. It will be watered down and mixed and in the end, the molecules will be absorbed by your body.
That doesn't mean that you should eat just about everything, that's not true. But I believe making the connection via "bacteria won't eat that, it's not good" doesn't make a good point.
Also, our stomach is full of acid, the purpose of which is to kill bacteria. Later on, in the intestine, you have a colony of microbes.
Pickled or fermented food is very healthy, and shelf stable. We've been doing that for millenia to preserve food.
It's not as simple as you suggest.
pasteurization and keeping further bacteria out is one way to do it
Both of these are false. Bacteria are not needed for the proper function of the human stomach (or the small intestine). The human body produces digestive enzymes, HCl and bile (and maybe bicarbonate) which combined will digest most foods without any help from bacteria.
Bacteria are needed in the large intestine to convert fiber into short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), but a person can live for many years without any of these SCFAs' being produced in the large intestine, although the person probably would be less healthy.
Do you think all that is bunk / pseudoscience?
Also, the environment on a kitchen counter is wildly different than the environment inside out stomach, so airborne bacteria- even if we were to presume these were the exact same kinds of bacteria present in our stomach - being uninterested in foods in the open air doesn't really translate to the idea that the food is indigestible. Many gut bacteria rely on us to break down foods into the things that they can digest, so a colony couldn't start on the surface of the same food(s) in the open air.