Goat cheese

Goat cheese is a fresh cheese, and fresh cheeses are low for a different reason from aged ones: the lactose left with the whey when the curd was drained, rather than being eaten over time. Removal beats fermentation here, and it happens in an afternoon rather than a season.

Goat cheese is low in lactose for the same reason every aged cheese is: the bacteria eat it during ripening, and most of what survives leaves in the whey when the curd is drained. Goat's milk itself has slightly less lactose than cow's, but ageing is what does the work here - a fresh goat cheese carries more than an aged one. Ciqual and USDA both carry this lactose figure, because one national table's value for a dairy product can sit well away from another's.

Goat cheese is low because fresh goat cheese is low, but an aged one is not - this is the axis where the same cheese name covers two different foods. Histamine in dairy is a storage measurement, not a recipe one. Pasteurisation, starter culture, salt, pH and ripening time decide more than the name on the label.

Goat cheese answers on lactose, which is a disaccharide and belongs to the other axis. Draining the whey took most of it away; whatever oligosaccharide the milk held went with the same liquid.

Goat cheese is fresh goat cheese, not the aged kind. On this axis dairy splits in two, and the dividing line is ripening: aged cheese is one of the four foods a MAOI diet excludes outright, while fresh dairy is among the safest things on the shelf. The same milk becomes either one.

Goat's milk was measured lower still than cow's, at around 13.6 micrograms per kilo. Ageing concentrates a cheese by removing water, which is why an aged goat cheese is not quite as empty as the milk it came from. The nickel here follows a national survey covering four decades - the kind of series that shows whether a level is drifting, which a single study never can.