Point/Counterpoint: The merits of cheese
Gouda Go My Own Way
Brittany Menjivar
Picture this: you’re sitting at a table in the Stiles dining hall. You glance to the side and see a girl aggressively scraping at something on her plate. There are too many napkins beside her. Scrape, scrape. “What are you doing?” you ask her, a little curious and a little afraid.
You lean over. She has a napkin in hand, and she is wiping at a flabby little bread triangle. She looks up, not surprised; she has heard this question before. “I take the cheese off my pizza,” she says nonchalantly.
This girl is me. I don’t like cheese. I don’t understand why you do, and I never will. I’ve been waiting to write this op-ed for 19 years.
As far as I can remember, my disgust with cheese was born, ironically, in a Chuck E. Cheese’s establishment. Most kids love Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza, but Young Britt did not. So I had the cheese removed — I think my mom helped me out (thanks Mom! You rock). Then I realized that flabby little bread triangles covered in sauce (and sauce alone!) are really, really tasty. This is what I tell people whenever they ask me why I “don’t just stick with regular bread,” a phrase I’ve heard since elementary school. Cheese-less pizza isn’t just tolerable to me; it’s a delicacy. Its yumminess points to a larger truth: when you tell yourself that cheese is good, you are really just lying to yourself. You’ve heard cheese complimented so many times that society’s approval of it has been ingrained in your mind. Let’s not ride with the tide of popular opinion; let’s do better.
You see, cheese always makes me queasy. (“Cheese rhymes with unease,” I like to say.) Many times, I’ve rambled about how “We’re probably not even meant to eat cheese! I feel like one day, back in the olden times, some really poor people saw that their milk had congealed or something and they were like, ‘Oh, this looks edible!’ And they ate it, and then they convinced themselves that it was good because they had to, and it became a trend.” According to trusty old Google, it looks like I might not be too far from the truth. Apparently, the majority of the world is lactose-intolerant. And when I look up “How is cheese made,” the first thing that comes up is a sample of a Wikipedia article. Without clicking the link, I can read the following sentence fragment: “It is probable that the process of cheese making was discovered accidentally by storing milk in a container made from the stomach of an animal, resulting in the milk being turned to curd and…”
Do I need to finish that sentence? No. Cheese was an accident, and whoever decided to eat the weird curd in his milk container was an accident, too. You can try to be “trendy” all you like, kids, but I’m a freaking nonconformist. Next time you see me with a flabby little bread triangle in the dining hall, smile at me. Say, “Hey.” I just want to be your friend. I don’t want to be judged.
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Sweet Dreams Are Made of Cheese
Mariah Kreutter
I would like to begin this op-ed by stating how absolutely bugnuts it is that I have been called upon to defend the honor of cheese, the only food that rivals chocolate in terms of universal adoration. Cheese is delicious. It is a living testament to the wonders of accidental innovation. And not liking it, while technically a valid opinion, is not the kind of thing anyone should feel compelled to share with the world. As if your own bad take will change anyone else’s mind.
Cheese is good for a number of reasons, not least because it checks all the boxes for an appealing flavor profile. Good cheese is a balance of salty, fatty, complex, and umami — you know, the secret fifth flavor no one can shut up about. That’s how you know it’s good. Not appreciating cheese isn’t wrong, per se — it’s simply, mmm, let’s call it unsophisticated. And I just used two em dashes in three sentences, so clearly I know what I’m talking about.
Moreover, not liking cheese is comparable to not liking music or not liking movies: there’s so much variation within the category that it makes very little sense to draw sweeping generalizations. The melty, gummy, salty-sweet comfort of sliced American has nothing in common with a tender, mild, milky fresh mozzarella, and even less with a pungent, crumbly, assertive parmigiano-reggiano. The point is, there’s a cheese for every taste and every occasion. Claiming to dislike cheese categorically just seems uninformed.
It’s true that when you really think about it, cheese sounds kind of gross. But this is true of many other indisputably Good Things, such as loofahs and sex. That cheese can rise from its relatively humble origins as curdled milk in an animal stomach to one of the most celebrated elements of haute cuisine is a stunning example of what one can achieve when one is a delicious dairy project.
That said, I would never judge a cheese-hater for their bad and wrong opinions. Instead, I would welcome them with open arms, because I can always use more friends who won’t hog the cheese plate when we eat out together.
