I don’t understand since to my knowledge they’re very similar compounds. Is something removed from the milk during the cheesemaking process that affects how it acts as it ages? Milk tends to go bad within a month but cheese can be aged for several years without becoming dangerous to consume.
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TLDR at the bottom. I am not a food scientist, but I do make a lot of fermented/aged food products including occasionally cheese. Cheese is basically an old school way to preserve milk.
Milk is super high in liquid, which allows it to spoil uniformly and creates a nice home for bacteria, it also contains no salt, a decent amount of sugar in the form of lactose and is an all around nice place to live if your a bacteria. If you take out the solids out and add salt you get cottage cheese, and if you press it you get paneer. These will spoil slower due to the water content being lower and the added salt, but you still get a pretty short shelf life. But basically the less water you leave in the cheese and the more salt you add, the longer it lasts until you end up with something like Parmesan that can stay good for years in its wheel form with the rind. That said there are also other things at play, for example cheese can be further preserved by introducing “good” mold/bacteria (like blue cheeses or “stinky” cheeses) that basically out compete any new mold or bacteria and add flavor without harming us. Or you can introduce an artificial rind with wax that will allow you to age a wheel of cheese that wouldn’t otherwise be suitable for long aging as is sometimes done with cheddar. Cheese making is old and pretty much every tradition that consumes milk has their form of it, so it’s a lot bigger than ELI5 but that’s the gist. The other way to preserve milk would be to intentionally introduce bacteria to outcompete the bad ones without removing the solids, that’s essentially what yogurt is.
TLDR More salt and less water is good for shelf life, people do other things to preserve it even further.
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