After being promoted by US bloggers and Instagram, cottage cheese sales are now up 40% in the UK. Its blandness is befitting of the times

While I didn’t see the cottage-cheese craze coming – who could ever have predicted this pineapple-chunk-inflected bout of collective madness? – now it’s here, I find myself strangely fascinated by it. In one sense, of course, its ascendancy is utterly banal: another creation of social media (its new popularity may be traced originally to TikTok), it can’t be long before the buffet moves on, maybe in the direction of luncheon meat or tinned mandarins. But on the other hand, it’s still deeply weird, especially to those of us who last ate cottage cheese three decades ago, and then only in extremis (as a student, I sometimes kept an emergency pot cooling on the window ledge of my college room for those piercing moments of youthful crisis when I had no time to eat properly).

Like a mushroom, this trend sprouted last year, seemingly overnight, in the US. “It’s time to stop pretending it’s not delicious,” said Emily Eggers, a New York chef and food blogger who was on a “mission” to make it the new burrata – a quote I thought so preposterous at the time, I quickly added it, last minute, to a book I was writing. But who’s laughing now? “In the 1970s, sales were focused on slimmers trying to lose weight before their holiday to Spain,” says Jimmy Dickinson, the owner of the brand we all remember, Longley Farm. “[But] now the interest is very much, ‘I’ve just swum 50 lengths, and I’ll eat cottage cheese as my protein fix at the end of it.’” According to Dickinson, demand in the UK has reportedly risen by as much as 40% in recent months, a growth that has been powered by the influencers of Instagram and their helpful recipes for dishes that try very hard indeed to make cottage cheese seem … oh dear. I had a look, and none of their ideas are even remotely alluring to my eyes. What, really, is the point of cottage-cheese cheesecake or cookie dough? Even if I was in search of a “protein hit” – at this point, I picture someone being beaten about the head with a leg of lamb – cottage-cheese lasagne is really not for me.