Cheese goes with almost everything, well almost. Mmmm just melt some on top and you’ve got a delicious dish – no matter what is underneath it. But, here are 7 Things You Don’t Know About: Cheese.

1. The red coloring in some cheeses is caused by adding annatto which is a derivative of the achiote tree.
2. Cheesemaking dates back to before Roman times, though no one is sure where the practice began.
3. The first industrial factory used to make cheese commercially opened in Switzerland in 1815.
4. On average the United States produces over twice as much cheese as the 2nd place country (usually Germany or France).
5. In Homer’s Odyssey, the Cyclops is noted as having made his own cheese.
6. The hobby of collecting cheese labels is called “tyrosemiophilia”.
7. Though the United States is the largest cheese producer by far, they are not in the top ten of cheese exporters as almost all of the cheese produced there is for domestic use.

Cheese is an incredibly popular food and will most likely remain so for a long time, kind of odd when you consider that part of the cheesemaking process is basically the controlled spoilage of milk byproducts.