How Many Kilos of Cheese Do We Eat in Our Lifetime?
Science has shown that cheese is incredibly addictive. The Dutch are living proof of that: every year, we munch our way through an average of 21.6 (!) kilos of cheese. And that doesn’t even include cheese products such as goat cheese and quark! So how much do we eat over the course of our entire lives? Quest did the math, and the figures are bizarre.
The average amount of cheese you get through in your lifetime naturally also depends somewhat on the age you eventually reach. In its research, Quest assumed a respectable lifespan of 81 years. The answer to the cheese question is then: 1,750 kilos. Hallelujah!
This Is How Much Cheese All Dutch People Eat per Year
That still leaves the question: how much cheese do all Dutch people eat in one year? If you assume a population of 17.6 million people, the Dutch eat 380 million kilos of cheese annually. Just to give you an idea: that’s equivalent to placing a 63-meter-high cheese on the Gouda cheese market. In other words, 369,000 cubic meters of cheese. Yep, Quest knows how to put things into perspective.
These Are the Biggest Cheese Eaters in the World
If these astonishing figures have you thinking: surely the Dutch must be the biggest cheese eaters in the world? Well, that’s not the case. In fact, the Netherlands doesn’t even make the top five. Switzerland (22.2 kilos), Germany (24.7 kilos), Cyprus (26.7 kilos), France (27.2 kilos), Finland (27.3 kilos) and Iceland (27.7 kilos) beat us when it comes to eating cheese. And the people who truly eat the most cheese are the Danes. They get through an impressive average of 28.1 kilos of cheese per person per year. So we should really hand our title of ‘cheeseheads’ over to our Danish friends.
The good news, however, is that people who eat a lot of cheese live longer. And since cheese also turns out to be healthier than we thought, we can happily spend a few extra years stuffing even more cheese down our gullets.
Also read:
- Tested: these are the tastiest and nastiest 30+ cheeses from the supermarket
- The sobering truth about vegan cheese
- You’ve been grating your cheese incorrectly your entire life
Source: Quest
