Page:Hand-book on cheese making.djvu/34



After contemplating the immensity of our annual cheese output, the question naturally arises, "Where does it all go to?" The earliest shipments of American cheese were made from New York to England in 1835 and 1836. The beginning was very limited; shipments of cheese were made in casks; $60,000 would probably comprise the value of all shipments made in those years. As England still remains our principal foreign customer, we will come down to the year 1882 and give the official figures of the port of New York of the annual receipts and exports. We do not mean to intimate that England takes all of our exports, but she absorbs the major portion of them. The 1888 export is not recorded yet. It is hard to get at the home trade quantity used throughout the country. There are many cheese distributed from factories to neighboring towns in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states of which no account is kept, and there are no statistics covering the entire make, but at a guess we should say it was about 4,000,000 boxes annually. The cause of decline in receipts at the port of New York since 1882, is largely due to the fact that a good many cheese made in the northern part of this State (N. Y.) are bought by Canadians and shipped via Montreal. It is said that Englishmen eat twelve pounds of cheese per capita a year, while Americans eat three pounds. Cheese consumption is, however, on the increase here, as the healthy and