Cottage cheese is back and feeding online food nostalgia

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In the 1980s, cottage cheese sales used to slump in the run-up to Christmas. Why buy diet food when there were mince pies and chocolates to scoff? This seasonal slide was ultimately good news for sales. As waistlines bulged, New Year’s resolutions prompted shoppers to swap indulgence for asceticism.

This year, however, there has been no such seasonal rise and fall. TikTok and Instagram have given cottage cheese a makeover, rebranding it as health rather than diet food. It is sought by men as well as women for its high protein content. For those on weight-loss drugs like Mounjaro, greater protein can help mitigate muscle loss.

According to Jimmy Dickinson, chief executive of Longley Farm in Yorkshire, a dairy farm started by his uncle and father more than 75 years ago, the trend began with weight trainers and marathon runners trying to boost their protein intake. “We started getting letters from people saying, ‘Where can I buy [cottage cheese] in bulk, I eat 14 cartons a week. Will it freeze?” he says. (The answer is yes, but only if defrosting to cook with.)

Emily Lloyd, food lead at organic vegetable box company Riverford, thinks unusual new recipes on social media have intensified demand. Cottage cheese flatbread, for example, is made by mixing cottage cheese with egg, salt and pepper, spreading it out on to greaseproof paper and baking it then using it as a wrap. There are also instructions for cottage cheese pancakes, cottage cheese bagels and cottage cheese pasta sauces.

Riverford says it is selling 29 per cent more pots of cottage cheese than a year ago — three times the amount sold pre-pandemic.

Resurfacing food trends of the past and remaking them for the present produces strangely comforting content says Emily Contois, associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence & Negotiation.

Remediation — a theory describing how one media form can incorporate another — helps explain food reboots. “Newer media, like social media, often incorporates aspects of older media — like film or TV,” she says.

Sometimes remediation is just a matter of digging up old shows. TikTok account @viralvintage found an excellent clip from 1981 in which TV presenter Esther Rantzen asks: “Have you noticed how exotic the humble crisp has become?” Members of the public are filmed trying flavoured crisps for the first time. One man nervously asks: “It’s not frog is it?” A woman in a woolly hat is slack-jawed with amazement when she tries hers, exclaiming: “Oh, oh prawn cocktail!” 

It is bemusing to watch new generations discover foods from your youth — much like when my stepdaughter asked if I’d ever heard of a band called The Cure.

Food revivals are not only down to youthful influencers, of course. A recent Taramasalata shortage in the UK left gourmets aghast that people were still eating the lurid pink dip popular in Britain in the 1970s. Some restaurateurs talk about reaching for the retro comfort of childhood food in times of turbulence, serving up knickerbocker glories and Neapolitan ice-cream sandwiches.

Jeff Green, psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, says nostalgia helps “buffer against and even correct negative states” including loneliness, social exclusion, even feeling cold. “People feeling lonely are more likely to activate nostalgic memories, which help to repair that negative state by making them feel more socially connected: they will think of past cherished events in which they spent a meaningful holiday with family or had a memorable adventure with close friends.”

Though as he points out, seeking nostalgic food content on social media might prove a vicious cycle. “Much better to log out,” says Green. “And go spend time with friends IRL.”

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