In Defense of a St. Louis Favorite, Provel Cheese

On paper, Provel cheese sounds horrible. It’s processed to the comical and oft-cited degree that it’s actually just made of three other cheeses: cheddar, Swiss, and provolone. Depending on how it’s cooked, its hues range from creamy off-white to golden-hour-orange, and its consistency is redolent of queso. And while there are many people who enjoy the St. Louis staple immensely, there are just as many — if not more — who maintain that its texture and flavor are closer to melted plastic than a dairy product. Beloved St. Louis pizza chain Imo’s Pizza, probably the cheese’s biggest commercial champion, describes Provel on its website as a “cheesy ingredient,” a rhetorical tap dance possibly indicating that even its greatest advocate is unsure of what it is. 

As a fan of Provel for many years, I am painfully familiar with what it means to love something that most people want to make sure you know they hate. When I tell people I grew up in St. Louis — I live in Chicago now — one of the first things they ask me is if I like Imo’s, the famous purveyor of cracker-thin pizza topped with Provel and cut in squares. (Imo’s is the preeminent example of the city’s namesake pizza style, and also the only one most people know about.) I often downplay it, saying the cheese is “fine,” or that I only eat Imo’s when I’ve had too many drinks. That's mostly because I’ve grown weary of hearing everyone’s opinions about it. But the truth is that my love for Provel is intense, almost mystical, and I’ve finally started taking it seriously.

Recently, I was on vacation in rural Michigan with some friends, and we were getting carryout from a local pizza spot we love. After a couple of slices, the conversation turned toward regional pizza. One of my friends brought up Provel, asking me, “What do you like about that stuff?” 

The lack of irony in his tone made me take his question seriously, and I actually thought about it — maybe for the first time. I realized that I’ve never really examined why I like Provel cheese. Honestly, I’ve never questioned why anybody likes it. Even as a staff writer at Sauce Magazine (St. Louis’ primary independent food publication until last year, when it was sold) I had never thought critically about Provel, despite having written about it many times.

Some of my earliest food memories involve opening my grandmother’s refrigerator and grabbing a plastic carton of Provel ropes, which come molded into a white, waxy, tangled cube resembling Twizzlers pull-apart licorice. This is one of the main forms Provel is sold in (the others being shredded and in five-pound blocks), and I would eat it by the handful.

By the time I was old enough for my opinion to count when my family ordered pizza, Imo’s was always in the running. When my best friend and I learned to drive and finally got cars, we would go to Cecil Whittaker’s — Imo’s biggest rival — on Mondays to use their weekly 2-for-1 coupons to order a couple of humongous pies topped with the chain’s own “St. Louis-style cheese,” stacking slices with different toppings on top of each other to create bites that ultimately looked closer to small, velvety-delicious servings of lasagna. All of this is to say that the long and short of why I initially loved Provel is that it was always around and it tasted good.

Provel enjoyers are treated as if their preference is some kind of measured decision that they came to after decades of tasting the world’s finest cuisines, and that really could not be further from the truth. People usually start loving Provel before they’re introduced to the illusory binary of “real” and “fake” cheese, and often before learning that St. Louis-style pizza is very different from the world’s other iconic styles, such as Detroit, New York, and Neapolitan. 

If you first try Provel as a child, you experience it in a very pure state, years before encountering the challenge of categorization. Provel is as much a regional cultural phenomenon as Skyline chili (Cincinnati), tavern-style pizza (Chicago), barbecue spaghetti (Memphis), pork roll or Taylor ham (New Jersey), and onion burgers (Oklahoma). These are not dishes that people commonly “decide” to like, but rather simply began existing in tandem with them.

To Midwestern taste buds calibrated for modern food, Provel is a home run. It’s 1. cheese, 2. extremely processed, 3. usually enjoyed on pizza, alongside toppings like bacon, mushrooms, or jalapeños. What is there not to like? It’s meticulously, scientifically engineered to delight your senses, the same way pieces of music by Mozart, Bill Evans, and Coldplay deliver cosmically fulfilling melodies that you cannot help but enjoy. Provel exists to be pleasing, and it’s very good at its job.

In that way, Provel reveals a certain potential of mass-produced processed food. There’s something to be said for how this moment of late capitalism brings the possibility of a food item that can be mass produced, has historical and cultural roots, is relatively versatile, and makes a lot of people happy. Sure, since it features distressing amounts of fat, sodium, and ominous ingredients like “smoke flavor,” Provel isn’t exactly a "healthy" option — at least in my opinion — but what if it was? That kind of thinking points towards opportunities to create large amounts of nutritious food that can satisfy many people, and that sounds like a good thing.

In the end, people are going to like what they like, and often won’t have a good reason for it. This is not a novel or especially interesting idea, but I do think it gets at something central to why so many people love Provel. Beloved regional foods often operate in a realm beyond taste. If you haven’t tried Provel, give it a shot. I personally know hundreds of people who would love to introduce somebody to Imo’s for the first time. If you’ve had it, though, and hate it, if you think it’s “fake cheese” or that it “tastes like cardboard,” let me respond on behalf of Missouri and say: We’ve heard it before, and with all due respect, nobody cares.