"But Can I Get Extra Cheese With My Cheese?" (VIDEO)

Do you ever wonder about cheese?

Not cheese in the French sense of cheese:

A really expensive hunk of something smelly with a few plain crackers and slices of ripe pear on a plate of pretentiousness.

But cheese in the American sense:

Buffalo cheese wings and cheese soup and cheesy bread sticks and cheesy dipping sauce with a side order of cheesy fries and spicy cheese chips with cheese on top?

What is our national obsession with fake cheese? Why are there cheese bagels? And cheese muffins? Why does delivery pizza have to stuff its crust with cheese even though there's already cheese on the pizza because pizza is already dough with cheese on top?

Why, at most chain restaurants, like Cheese Garden and AppleCheese's, does even the salmon come stuffed with cheese and/or topped with cheese sauce? Why do I fear that the next new "flavor" of Cheerios will be "Cheese-Flavored" Cheerios?

Why?!

Please. Someone. Explain.

 

 

 

Follow Laura Zigman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LauraZigman

Comments

[tsudopnem]

08:39 AM on 01/25/2012

Hilarious. I just got back to Asia from a trip to England with a suitcase full of extra stinky cheddar and stilton. My freezer is the envy of my English friends. Koreans seem to love the cheese food with which America is also enamored. Real cheese costs a fortune here. I could never eat that much of the real thing. It's way too strong. Kraft and all that stuff is practically the same as salted butter.

[Simplovore]

05:42 PM on 01/24/2012

From The Emperor of Scent: "Raised in France, Luca Turin is happy to admit that "the idea that things should be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere in France." Given a stinky cheese, says he, Americans think, "Good God!"; Japanese think, "I must now commit suicide"; and the French think, "Where's the bread?"

The mystery to me is why the American public thinks it likes cheese. It does not. It likes cheese food, or more specifically, congealed fat. Like the mayonnaise eaten here, which has to be compromised with sugar, (and which Julia Child loved), the tastes here are for fat, in any form. In Naples, many Pizzerias offer pizza only two ways: with cheese or without. Both are loved, both are pizza.
The endless addition of cheese to nearly everything came about because cheese has become cheap and flavorless, and so, naturally, ridiculously popular.

It wasn’t always this way: http://simplovore.wordpress.com/tag/sandwich/