Do not eat the orange cheese

The problem with orange cheese isn’t so much in its orangeness. Orange is in fact one of my favorite colors, the brighter the better. The problem is that mass producers use the quality of orangeness to cover up for an overall lack of actual quality.

The research bears this out. Food coloring is marketing, not flavoring, not preservative and not necessary; appearance is everything and perception is reality. The overwhelming speculative history says that orangeness came to be in cheese quite by accident and as a result of bovine diet, with some variation for seasonality. In the days when people just made a product and then put it out there for consumption this was not of a major concern. But with the advent of mass transit and mass commerce it becomes a factor and suddenly the world is a wash with “me-too” orange tinted cheeses that taste like nothing more than sub-par dairy coagulant.

The fact is orangeness in cheese today is all about orange and not cheese. It’s orange because its made that way, because someone in the marketing department felt it should be; not because of some natural chemical reaction of cow, grass and farmer. In fact the likelihood of actual orange cheeses ever being available is highly unlikely. The original real orangeness was due to beta-carotene levels in the milk, which got there from the grass that cows ate. Note cows ate grass. That’s another tragedy. For some reason cows don’t eat grass anymore. Now we feed them corn and other ground up cows. I’m not sure why that is but I imagine that is got something to do with why they use a synthetic white compound in TV ads instead of real milk. Reality is perception but just what the heck are we all perceiving?

It’s all further proof that bad ideas gain traction just as well as good ones. And bad ideas need to be called out and berated for what they are. It’s a bad idea to make cheese orange. It’s also a bad idea to market a substance that is so corrosive in its pure form that it can melt pavement, especially when your major market is kids. I call that disgusting and immoral. You might call it cola. I’m not willing to call it just a difference of opinion.

Take cigarettes for example. Smoking is not a life style “choice.” It’s a dumb idea that is followed up with a narcotic like addiction and further punished with emphysema, lung cancer and other not-good stuff. This seem like it should be obvious. Most people who die in a fire die from smoke, not fire. But lots of people still smoke. Have they been fooled or are they just fools. One can never tell.

Purveyance of orange cheese may not be on the same scale as pushing dope on babies, but it is a slippery slope. Acceptance of such basic unrealities leads directly to the issuances of new even more ridiculous concepts. Like for instance transforming countries that were once ruled by arrogant and brutal dictators, who were themselves proceeded by various oppressive monarchies and occasional chaos, into modern beacons of uncorrupted democracy by way of superior firepower.

Bad ideas are bad ideas. Do not eat the orange cheese.

Why you don't know cheese

It’s not so much that I grew up in luxury and need to lord that above everyone else, silver spoon rammed up my nose and all that. Actually it is just the opposite. I grew up in dirt.

“You could grow carrots in there,” my Mom used to say looking at my fingernails. As I remember it I spent every summer sitting in a pile of dirt. That was my first canvas. The worlds I built there were rich with imagination and just enough ignorance about what is possible. It was a ‘Huck Finn’ childhood, which I have yet to really grow out of and as I look out on your planet today, mostly it doesn’t measure up. And so I have become a hopeless snob.

“Oh” you say, “tough break, you had a happy childhood, get over it.”

But see when you taste something for the very first time, no matter how good or bad it is, that becomes your base line for understanding a thing, be it maple syrup, love or art. You can’t help but compare all subsequent renditions to that first thing. That’s part of why Hollywood sequels are always so bad. It’s not just that they aren’t very good, but in comparison to the original they are even worse.

Lets take cheese for example, because really this is the root of all-evil, I mean the whole problem. My earliest impression of cheese is Cabot Sharp Cheddar. To me this is cheese at its core, the very essence of cheese. So when you hand me some bright orange block of pasteurized dairy product and try to pass it off as “cheese,” as “cheddar cheese” no less, well what kind of reaction do you expect; I scoff. That simply does not even approach my baseline experience of cheese. And yet there are whole companies organized around the buying and selling, packaging and pushing, of this less-than-cheese; are these people innocently misinformed or is there a deeper sort of malice here? Given the history of most of humanity, crusades, ethnic cleansing and the sort, I’m not inclined to think that this is just a simple misunderstanding. Tasteless blocks of dairy coagulant are NOT cheese. I can’t belabor this enough. If you are eating such non-cheese and finding satisfaction its only because you have been successfully duped by slick marketing and a lack of proximity to real cheese. So stop.

And that’s when my Mom would say, “stop being such a snob.” What? It’s ok to let this sham go on? We put a stop to Nixon and his Watergate nonsense. The Church finally had to owe up to that pedophile predicament, so why must we continue to perpetuate false cheese upon the people. Look, a crime against humanity is a crime against humanity. It’s a moral slippery slope. First not-cheese is OK, then not-justice.

And don’t even get me started about not-ice cream.

One

Among the many things I will be writing about are why I am right. Naturally that leads to "and you're wrong," but I'm becoming a little less inflexible in my old age. You may not be wrong, but that doesn't make me any less right. And that is essentially why this is the snob report. I recognize that I hold my own ideas about the universe in much higher esteem than anybody else's, but in review I find I'm not wrong. That whole "bell bottom" thing is just an example.

snob: a person who believes himself or herself an expert or connoisseur in a given field and is condescending toward or disdainful of those who hold other opinions or have different tastes regarding this field.
( Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006).

Yep, it's that accurate.