Stringy Goodness

Why does the type of plastic wrap depend on the flavor of string cheese?

I don't think anyone else has ever realized this.

Well, I have and I'm curious.

I don't think I even realized there were different flavors of string cheese.  What's up with that?

It was a pretty new revelation to me, too.  Recently, I was in the grocery store and happened upon the cheese section.  Thinking that I haven't had string cheese in a long time, I located that section of the display, and found a whimsical variety of packages I'd never seen before.  String cheese now apparently comes in Colby-Jack, Cheddar, and the classic Mozzarella.  Yes, that's totally an Oxford comma.  

I picked up a package of Mozzarella as well as a Cheddar, partially because I was curious, and partially because Cheddar is basically awesome.  Over the time since then, I've been happily enjoying my string cheese.  Incidentally, this is poorly named (and maybe I should check the packaging, but I can't be bothered) because the Cheddar string cheese does not come apart in strings whatsoever.  The mozzarella does exactly as expected, but the Cheddar only comes in clumps.  

Anyway, what's important to note is the ease in which the cheese is obtained.  They both come in nearly identical packages, in which tubes of cheese are individually wrapped.  The wrappers are designed to come apart by pulling two flaps at the top in opposite directions, at which point the top sheet of plastic is removed, and the tube of cheese is freed from its form-fitting back wrapper.  This is great in theory, but in reality, the cheddar wrapper sucks.  It starts to split down the middle, and comes apart in pieces to the point where you have to maneuver the cheese to get it out.  I have had precisely zero structural failures with the mozzarella wrappers, but every last cheddar wrapper I've tried to open has ended in cheesey disaster, and not in a Michael Bay kind of way.  So my question to the scientific community is as follows:  What's up with that?