Cottage cheese is curds that have been drained and mixed with cream and salt, which gives it a soft, creamy, faintly soupy texture that people either do not mind or cannot get past. Its reputation is mostly an accident of when it was popular. American consumption peaked in the 1970s, when dieting became common and roughly $1.3 billion of it was sold a year, so for a whole generation the food is inseparable from being on a diet: a scoop on a lettuce leaf, eaten under duress. It then spent decades in decline. The recent recovery has come from a completely different direction: market reviews place it alongside Greek yogurt as a high-protein, low-sugar option, and in 2026 cheese factories in Wisconsin and other states modified equipment to keep up with demand for it as a protein source. So the poll is catching two audiences at once. Roughly a fifth hate it, a fifth love or like it, and the difference between them is largely whether they first met cottage cheese as a punishment or as protein.