" By 5500 BCE, we were making cheese. Sieves and pottery colanders resembling modern cheese strainers had been found in Poland, and in 2012, again, telltale residues were scraped off these ancient dishes. The suboptimal washing-up skills of the people who owned this crockery again revealed fat from milk. Cheese, of course, is a strange thing in itself, and odd that we should eat it. It’s milk that has gone bad, probably the first processed food, but it may have been a useful way of storing the nutrient-rich milk in solid form, possibly more like a glob of mozzarella than a wheel of Stilton. "

― Adam Rutherford , A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes