Whenever I’m about to fly back home to Israel, where I spent most of my youth and early adulthood before moving to U.S. and starting a family of my own, my mom, still always trying to nurture, asks me what kind of food she should have ready in her fridge when I land. I know I should ask for a homemade dish — she is a supreme cook after all — but the first thing I ask for is always, “gvina levana” — white cheese, cottage cheese 5% and 9%, and other forms of dairy.
That “white cheese”? It’s a perfect sweet and a touch tangy, just the right amount of creaminess that allows it to be spread inside a fluffy pita or dolloped onto a bowl of freshly chopped salad, the mix of olive oil and tomato seeds and juices the most delightful of savory treats.
The cottage cheese has curds that are, in my eyes, the Goldilocks of cottage curds — not too big, not to small — and the flavor is the best I’ve found anywhere: not too sour and no trace of an unpleasant aftertaste. It took more than a decade in America to find a single brand of cottage cheese that comes close to being that good (it’s the large curd cottage cheese at ShopRite, if you’re wondering).
As a child, I would guzzle down the blue and white cartons of Revion, a kind of tangy buttermilk that’s better in my eyes than any of the fancy kefir you get from Whole Foods. There’s also “gvina tzehuba,” yellow cheese, a more infrequent treat in my house, but the sliced cheese is so delicious inside the widely beloved Israeli bagel toast. There’s briny half-hard tzfatit with that subtle salty flavor that Jews have been making in the northern Israeli city of Tzfat for centuries and pairs so beautifully with literally everything. There’s Bulgarian cheese, that’s not really Bulgarian at all, that you need on the side of your watermelon. There’s Israeli “cream cheese” with bits of olive that spreads silkily over bread and bagels and puts all other deli schmears to shame.
And don’t even get me started on Israel’s sweet dairy like Milky, the chocolate pudding with a layer of fluffy whipped cream on top.
So what makes Israeli cheese the platonic ideal of all dairy industries? (Sorry for being dramatic but I’m right.) Israel is known as the start-up nation, but it actually also boasts one of the world’s most advanced dairy industries in the world. Israeli cows produce more milk than most, and that milk is not just plentiful, it is delicious. It is, after all, the land of milk and honey, and while the honey in Israel can be pretty standout, nowhere in the world does milk flow quite as plentifully — the country’s cows, thanks to advanced technology that helps monitor their health and other leading edge technology and methods, yield perhaps more milk than any in the world according to this JNS article.
Israel’s dairy tech industries are also world leaders. The four biggest and most iconic milk manufacturers in the country are Tnuva, Strauss, Tara and Gad though there are many smaller dairies across the country that are worth a visit, many in kibbutzim and moshavim. Just like any industry, the Israeli dairy industry took a particularly hard hit after October 7 — 20% of its dairy farms were under fire on October 7, and not all are back in operation.
The dairy industry in the country started before the state of Israel was established, and it has always been central to feeding Israelis. During the time of austerity after the state’s foundation, Eshel, a fermented milk yogurt, was a key ingredient in every Israeli household, and many of that generation of older Israelis still eat it on the daily. I have so many fond memories of watching my grandfather eating those plastic goblets of Eshel and Leben (another delicious savory milk treat) in the mornings. A spoiled kid in Israel is called “yeled shamenet,” a “cream kid,” an expression that dates back to austerity and was first just “Tnuva kid.” At that time, the best-fed kids belonged to kibbutzim and had the most access to dairy.
In 2011, a protest over the high cost of living was called the Cottage Cheese Boycott, and it came about because a minister in the Israeli Knesset announced that cottage cheese prices would no longer be under regulation, as they previously were, and Tnuva, the company that holds a monopoly share of the industry, raised its prices significantly. Israelis eventually got the prices down, because you can’t get between Israelis and their cottage cheese.
Shavuot is one of the biggest holidays of the dairy industry, and companies prepare for it months in advance. There are many explanations as to why we eat so much cheese on Shavuot. But growing up, I thought about it in the same way many think about Valentine’s Day here — if that holiday belongs to the Hallmark Card company, then Shavuot in Israel is the holiday of Big Dairy. Cheesecakes, blintzes and bourekas are traditional Shavuot foods and I have to say I don’t think the rich American cheesecakes can compare to the fluffiness of a cheesecake made with Tnuva or Tara’s gvina levana. Israeli influencers spend the days and weeks before Shavuot sharing mouth-watering recipes, often sponsored by the country’s big dairy manufacturers. And while the recipes are all delicious, I would argue that Israeli dairy is best in its simplest form.
To me, every day is Shavuot when I’m back in Israel, where I consume more dairy than I do in what is now my American home (where I’ve cobbled together a few products that taste close to, but aren’t quite as good as Israeli dairy). When I open that fridge after putting down my suitcases in my childhood home, a stack of containers with a house painted on them greet me — Tnuva’s containers have a drawing of a house, a tree on them and their slogan is “to grow up in an Israeli home” — and even though I want to be snide about the marketing, I have to say, that first bite of cheese when I get back to Israel — aside from the hugs from my loved ones — is the one thing that truly makes me feel like I’m home.
