20th January: Cheese Day

It's Cheese Day, so here are 10 facts about cheese:

1. There are more than 2,000 different types of cheese in the world. 700 of these are produced in the UK alone. France, surprisingly, only produces 400 different types of cheese.
2. The French aren't the largest consumers of cheese, either - they come second in the world statistics: a French person eats about 24kg of cheese a year. They are pipped at the post by Greece, where the average person eats 27.3kg a year, 75% of which is feta cheese. The top cheese producer is the USA, especially California and Wisconsin.
3. Cheese cannot be sold as Stilton unless it is made in Derbyshire, Leicestershire or Nottinghamshire. Cheese made in the actual village of Stilton, Cambridgeshire, cannot be so called. The reason Stilton cheese was named after a place where it isn't actually made? The village of Stilton was a popular stopping off point for stagecoaches travelling from London to Edinburgh, and The Bell was a popular inn. In 1743 the landlord of The Bell started serving an interesting cheese he had discovered in Leicestershire. Because people ate it in Stilton, they started calling it Stilton.
4. Saint Bartholomew is the patron saint of cheesmongers.
5. It takes about 10 pounds of Milk to make one pound of cheese.
6. The word cheese comes from the Latin word caseus, which also gave rise to the word for cheese in several other languages, for example, queso (Spanish), kaas (Dutch). The French word, fromage, and the Italian formaggio derive from Caseus Formatus which was the term the Romas used for the hard, molded (ie formed) cheese which was supplied to soldiers.
7. In Roman times, rich people would have a separate kitchen just for making cheese, called a careale.
8. Does cheese really give you bad Dreams if you eat it late at night? Not according to the 2005 study by the British Cheese Board. More than three quarters of their sample reported undisturbed sleep after eating 20g of cheese before bed. It did seem to help with dream recall, though, and it seemed that different types of cheese induced different types of dreams. So, if you want to dream about celebrities, eat cheddar; if you want to dream about your childhood, eat Red Leicester; if you want to dream about work, eat Lancashire. Eat Cheshire if you'd rather not dream at all.
9. Cheese also gets bad press because of its fat content, but eating it has benefits as well. Some varieties of cheese like mozzarella, cheddar, Swiss and American, help prevent tooth decay by increasing the flow of saliva; it is an excellent source of protein, calcium, and phosphorus, and its high levels of the serotonin-producing amino acid tryptophan can induce sleep and reduce stress.
10. Cheese is mentioned three times in the Bible - (in 2 Samuel 17, Job 10 and 1 Samuel 17).