Why doesn't cottage cheese taste like rotten milk and vice versa?

Isn’t cottage cheese just curdled milk? If is is then why doesn’t it tast like rotten milk and why does rotten milk taste so bad?

Or yogurt? Isn’t that rotten milk too?

Cottage cheese is not really curdled milk. It is a soft cheese made by seperating the curd (milk protein and butterfat) from the whey (the liquid).

Curdled milk, is actually rancid milk and tastes bad for the same reason that any rotten food does. Namely, bacteria.

There are all kinds of bacteria. Some produce toxins. Leave the milk in a warm place and you might get food poisoning, on the other hand you might get Yoghurt or possibly “pot cheese.”
Totally OT: the subatomic particle “quark” was supposedly taken from an apparent nonsense phrase in Finnegan’s Wake… yet “quark” is a kind of flavorless cheese similar to one gigantic milk curd. James Joyce may have even been referring to this.

So why is the subatomic particle always described as a meaningless word? I can buy a hunk down at the Ballard market. Deep inside the nucleus we find fundamental quanta of cottage cheese with an electric charge of 1/3 or 2/3.