Enzymes

Most of the time when a label hides something, it does so by accident of naming. This one is written into the regulation in plain sight.

The sentence

The US standard for blue cheese lists what may go in, and clotting enzymes appear as “rennet and/or other clotting enzymes of animal, plant, or microbial origin”.

Then, under label declaration, it says:

Enzymes of animal, plant, or microbial origin may be declared as “enzymes”

Three origins, one word, permitted explicitly. The same construction appears across the cheese standards.

Why this is the vegetarian cheese problem

Cheese needs something to coagulate the milk. Traditionally that is Rennet, taken from the stomach lining of a calf. Microbial and fermentation-produced alternatives are now widespread and are what most vegetarian cheese uses.

Both satisfy the word enzymes.

So a cheese whose ingredient list reads milk, salt, cultures, enzymes has told you nothing about the coagulant, and no amount of careful reading recovers it. The label is complete and correct, and the question is still open.

That is a different situation from an ingredient whose origin is merely unstated, like Mono- and diglycerides. Here the regulation has actively authorised the compression.

What the word covers outside cheese

Bread. Amylases and other enzymes are used as processing aids to improve dough. They are often not declared at all, since a processing aid that has no function in the finished food can be treated differently from an ingredient.

Fruit juice. Pectinases clarify it.

Supplements. Digestive enzyme products name theirs individually, which is the one place the word is usually specific rather than collective.

Lipase, used for flavour development in some Italian cheeses, is frequently animal-derived, and it is a second enzyme question hiding behind the same word in exactly the products where people ask about the first one.

For halal and kosher observance

The stakes are higher and the mechanism is identical. Whether the enzyme came from a permitted animal, slaughtered in a permitted way, or from a microbe, is precisely what the word conceals, and it is one of the reasons cheese is among the most heavily certified categories there is.

The page on halal and kosher labelling sets out why the certification mark carries the supply chain and the ingredient list cannot.

The honest summary

This is not a scandal and nobody is breaking a rule. It is a labelling convention that made sense when enzymes were a technical detail and makes less sense now that a large number of readers care about the answer.

Until it changes, the word enzymes on a cheese means the question is unanswered, and knowing that is more useful than guessing either way.