Say Cheese
Nope, this has nothing to do with cats or cameras. It’s just a cute photo.
Now, picture a big block of cheese. Cheddar. Yellow, soft and pretty nice-smellin’.
Then imagine some parmesan. Un-grated and un-adulterated.
Maybe mozzarella next. Softer, squishier. Waiting to be thrown in with a salad.
Feta. The King of the Cheeses, in my opinion.
At this point, you’re probably wondering what the hell is this about. The Global Cheese Admiration Society? Hardly.
But throw in all these cheeses together, melt them and you get the perfect cultural metaphor.
The world is a giant fondue pot.
Globalization allowed us to find out about other cheeses across the world. How they looked, how they tasted and what their peculiarities were. It allowed us to create new recipes, infusing ‘their’ cheese into ‘our’ recipes, leading to something revolutionary.
More types of ‘foreign’ cheeses were then thrown at these fusion recipes, and voila! Second and third-generation dishes. Identity crises abound. “Where do these dishes belong?”, we moan. “Where do they come from?”.
Lately though, there’s been resistance.Greeks have started sticking to their Feta. Brits to their Cheddar and Italians to their Mozzarella.
Maybe they each feel that they know how to make the best cheese. They know how ‘things are supposed to be done’. Maybe things changed too quickly. Maybe for them, too many new things wasn’t a good thing.
But fear of the new doesn’t justify not exploring it. Remember the time when you tried a dish you thought would be nasty, but really was delicious? Instead of pushing away the new, maybe we can learn from it. Adopt the things we like about it. Become better.
We can learn from Cheddar’s grill-ability, Mozzarella’s flexibility and Feta’s tangibility (eh, sorry, tanginess*).
And then we can usher in the age of the super cheese.
If extended metaphors isn’t your thing, I’ll clarify that this really wasn’t about cheese. But most of life is.
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