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.