Shadowing Practice: The real reason cheese is yellow - Learn English Speaking with Video
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This is a story about a lie that we've been told our whole lives.
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It's a story about marketing, economics, science, and biology.
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And most importantly, it's about why a lot of cheese is orange.
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Cheesemaking basically starts here.
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I know, it seems like we're starting a little bit early on in the process, but hang in there with me.
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Animals like cows, buffalo, goats, sheep, they naturally eat grass, grass, which gives them the nutrients they need to produce milk, and that milk gets turned into cheese.
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That is one vascular udder, by the way.
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In the 12 and 1300s, sheep were often the main producers of milk, but the catch was that...
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A sheep can turn their grass intake into either wool or milk, but not the same amount of both, simultaneously.
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That's Paul Kinston, former president of the American Dairy Science Association and a multi-published author on the subject of cheese.
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right from undergraduate work, you know, and then through graduate school became my love, my first love.
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And talking about love, just hold on a second.
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And talking about love, if you love Vox content as much as Paul Loves Cheese and I Love French Fries, then you should know about our membership program.
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It's the best way to support our journalism and get some exclusive perks and pardon my eating while I explain this.
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I've been filming all day and haven't had a chance to have a snack.
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So, weeks of work go into the making of every Vox video.
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And that goes from mother.
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Weeks of work go into the making of every Vox video.
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And that includes things like writing, scripting, animating, editing, filming, talking to experts like Paul, fact-checking everything.
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All that takes...
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All of that takes a lot of time and effort.
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And support from our members makes all that time and effort possible.
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So if you want to ensure that videos like the ones that we make keep getting made on the internet, the best way that you can do that is by joining our membership program.
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So if that's something that speaks to you, go to vox.com slash memberships and join today.
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Now, back to the video.
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Switching the milk used for cheese from this to this had a profound effect on people's perception of cheese.
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All because of something in the grass.
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Beta-carotene.
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Beta-carotene is a complex compound that creates color.
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It's what gives carrots and apricots and sweet potatoes their signature orange.
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Grass when it's lush and green and in season, contains beta-carotene.
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When sheep process the beta-carotene in grass, it doesn't make its way into the milk.
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Therefore sheep cheese is pretty much always naturally white.
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In the cow it's a different metabolic pathway.
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Beta-carotene goes into the cow, passes into the milk, is part of the fat in milk, and then gets concentrated in the cheese,
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and that's what gives cow's milk cheese its yellow color.
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Cheese made in sort of the spring, early summer always has been recognized as really yellow, which it is, and also higher in quality.
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I mean, it was always revered.
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Because of that, people really wanted yellow cheese.
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But cheesemakers, they wanted to make money.
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And the second change in terms of marketing that happened that became really important, cow's milk forms cream easily.
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So cheese makers figured out pretty quickly that they could skim off some cream before making cheese to make butter.
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Butter had a better price in the marketplace.
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But the problem with the cheese was with less cream, there's less beta carotene carrying over because it's in the butter and so it didn't look as good.
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Farmers were ending up with yellow butter and pale cheese, but they realized
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that they could scam the system by dying the cheese to look like it was full of that beta carotene filled fat.
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So that begins to happen in the 1400s, 1500s and they used things like saffron or marigold or,
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believe it or not, carrot juice.
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But everything changed once these bad boys hit the market.
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The annatto seed.
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The seed comes from this shrub that grows in South America.
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The Dutch, who followed in the wake of the Spanish colonizers as traders, learned about annatto and they saw a market.
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So in the 1600s, they began to export annatto from South America to Europe.
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Because there aren't a lot of really good colorants available and Europe is getting very wealthy and they like colorful things.
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And so it didn't take long for cheesemakers to realize they could replace these expensive colorants like saffron
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or marigold or carrot juice, because they're not very intense.
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And annatto was superior and it was cheap
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and cheeses then began to be either surface applied with annatto like the dutch did for gouda
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or it was added to the milk to make english hard-pressed cheeses like cheshire and cheddar
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look like they were from rich spring milk you know full of beta carotene so the coloring was
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for marketing and this then becomes the tradition over centuries this is the way you know real cheese is made.
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And that's why today you still get cheeses that look like this.
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With factory farming, cows aren't as grass-fed as they used to be.
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Their diets tend to include a lot more corn and soy.
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But because we've been used to centuries of saturated colors of cheese, none of that really matters when it comes to marketing.
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We still expect our cheddar to maintain a golden hue, and you can still thank annatto for that.
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Annatto is used all over food too, often making its way into many other cheese-adjacent snacks all of which carry on that long orange legacy.
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But if you go to your local grocery store, you'll see that the cheese is varied.
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Take this cheddar, for instance.
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There's the yellow dyed cheddar that we expect, and then there's the undyed white cheddar.
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But if you go to your local cheesemonger, you might be able to find the perfect in-between, grass-fed cheddar cheese that's naturally tinted with beta-carotene,
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which, when you prefer, is up to your own taste and expectations.
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I grew up with white Vermont cheddar as a kid.
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I prefer raw milk cheddar, by the way.
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I live, you know, right down the road from a wonderful raw milk cheddar cheese maker.
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My kids grew up on it.
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It's pricey, but boy, it's good.
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And it's not colored.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The real reason cheese is yellow”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: cheese, milk, carotene, cheddar, beta. This video has 78 sentences and 1093 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:28. The speaker talks at a natural 169 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| carotene noun | /ˈkæɹ.əˌtin/ | A class of tetraterpene plant pigments; they vary in colour from yellow, through orange to red, this colour originating in a chain of alternating single and… |
| cheddar noun | /ˈt͡ʃɛdə(ɹ)/ | A cheese styled after the Cheddar cheese made in Cheddar. |
| annatto noun | /əˈnɑːtoʊ/ | A tropical American evergreen shrub, Bixa orellana; the lipstick tree; the fruit of the tree. |
| sheep noun | /ˈʃiːp/ | A woolly ruminant of the genus Ovis. |
| carrot noun | /ˈkæɹət/ | A vegetable with a nutritious, juicy, sweet root that is often orange in colour, Daucus carota, family Apiaceae, especially the subspecies sativus. |
| cheesemaker noun | A person skilled in the art of making cheese | |
| marigold noun | /ˈmæɹ.ɪˌɡoʊld/ | Any of the Old World plants, of the genus Calendula, with orange, yellow or reddish flowers. |
| saffron noun | /ˈsæfɹən/ | A plant of species Crocus sativus, a crocus. |
| snack noun | /snæk/ | A light meal. |
| cow noun | /kaʊ/ | An adult female of the species Bos taurus, especially one that has calved. |
| animate adjective | /ˈæn.ə.mət/ | That lives. |
| apricot noun | /ˈeɪ.pɹɪ.kɑt/ | A round sweet and juicy stone fruit, resembling peach or plum in taste, with a yellow-orange flesh, lightly fuzzy skin and a large seed inside. |
| cheesemaking noun | The production of cheese | |
| cheesemonger noun | Someone who sells cheese. | |
| colonizer noun | One who makes a group or place into a colony; one who establishes a colonial relationship. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| carry over verb | To transfer (something) to a later point in time. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | we've been told · has been recognized · was always revered |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've been told · haven't had · has been recognized |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 12 contractions and reduced forms, such as aren't, didn't, we've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: sheep /ˈʃiːp/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/
- Long words — get the stress right: metabolic /mɛtəˈbɒlɪk/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, importantly /ɪmˈpɔɹ.tənt.li/, simultaneously /ˌsaɪmlˈteɪnɪəsli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like carotene, cheddar, annatto.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.