Something that should be clear by now is we have a broad range of interests. That includes food. My wife and I have a 1600 square foot vegetable garden. In some years we have extracted about 1,000 pounds of winter squash from it, in addition to quarts of tomato sauce, myriad zucchini, peppers, cucumbers, leaf vegetables, beets, basil, and on and on.
But we've been aging cheese, as well. A well-aged Tillamook cheddar can beat just about any other cheese, and, if you have the space in your 'fridge (or a separate refrigerated cheese vault), you can enjoy some really flavorful cheese for a very cost. We have aged cheddar, in its original wrapper, for well over 10 years. The acid level of the cheese, plus the salt content, does a good job of preserving it. And the aging process produces lots of flavor components (like glutemates) that really ratchet up the flavor.
As an experiment, we bought a 2 pound brick of Tillamook "colby" cheese awhile back. It is a milder sorta-cheddar/jack cheese. But the price was right, and we had the space to store it awhile. Well, that aging time turned into 15 years (!). We rediscovered it, observed some potential issues, so decided to open the package and taste it. Well, it is just fine -- some might say terrific. Because this style of cheese often has some added red pigment, it looks a little odd --pink-- but it tastes great. By the way, a well-aged Tillamook that has absorbed some truffle flavor from some Oregon white truffles, is amazing.
The main issue with preserved food is either the hydration level (think jerkey on the good side) or acid. If the acid level produces a pH level of 4.3 or lower, clostridium botuliun can't grow, so the food is safe to consume. Not to say it's tasty, that depends on other fermentation parameters. Fermentation is not just about beer or wine, it helps make sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, and artisan sausages. It converts part of the food product to (typically) lactic acid. Acids reduce the pH of food, and most putrefying bacteria don't like low pH. So they are more stable.
Fermentations like this are used to produce (as mentioned above), sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi and sausages. It also is used to make bread, cider vinegar, wine, beer, sake, miso, soy sauce, fish sauce, and many other foods found across the world. In most cases, the fermented foods have more nutritional benefits than the original input biomass. This it not an opinion. Additional nutritional benefits are well documented.
Just say'in.
