Complex Numbers

Praise Cheeses!

Let's kick off October with an entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]

Cheese

Back in the noughties, I visited the UK for a couple of weeks, and spoke to a lot of nice British folks (and some who weren't so nice, but not for quite as long). "Oh, you're American," they said as soon as I uttered a single word. "You must like Bud Light."

Well, no, I hate that watered-down fake excuse for beer. Even then, I was a craft beer snob, and I told them so. "Actually, there are thousands of local and regional craft breweries in the US, and I've made it my life's mission to try them all."

It's similar there, only they called it "Real Ale." Whatever; I'm used to us having different words for the same concept.

"Well, what about wine? Surely you get all your wine from France."

"Actually, while French wine is quite good, we have thousands of local and regional vineyards producing spoiled grape juice. In fact, I live very close to the place that perfected the science of winemaking in less-than-ideal climate conditions."

I got, "Wow, the US is more advanced than I thought." (I decided not to contradict them on this point.) "Well, what about cheese?"

"...okay, you got me there."

The UK produces and exports a wide variety of cheeses, mostly named after their region. The most famous and widespread (pun intended) of these is, of course, Cheddar. While there are certainly some small cheesemakers in the US, most of the crap you find in stores is industrially prepared, quality-controlled, and distributed nationally, and as far as I know, we haven't innovated our own cheese styles like the British (or French or Swiss or anyone else) has. One exception is Monterey Jack, .which, while American in origin, is more Mexican in ancestry, as it came from that part of California. Most of the real cheese produced in the US seems to be copies of European styles: Gruyere, Brie, Gouda, Stilton, etc.

A lot of the cheese sold here isn't "cheese" in anything but the most legal, FDA-approved sense, in that it passed near a cow on its way from the factory to the store. The worst offender is the plastic "pasteurized process cheese food" usually marketed as American cheese; or, as I like to put it, the dairy counterpart to Bud Light. Of course it's called American: it's bland, fake, and uncultured.

While I admit to a) liking that stuff as a kid and b) buying mass-produced real cheese from the store because it's cheaper, I'm just as much of a cheese snob as I am a beer and wine snob. Very little pleases me more, where food is concerned, than walking into a new-to-me grocery store and discovering that they have a wide variety of domestic and imported cheeses.

And I like all of it.

Some more than others, of course. Soft cheese, hard cheese, cottage cheese, moldy cheese, whatever, doesn't matter. There's also an art to pairing different cheeses with different wines or beers. As with all art, I suck at it, but I can appreciate others' efforts.

One reason I will never be vegan is, in fact, cheese. Not meat -- I could suffer through the rest of my life without meat if I had to, but you will have to pry my cheese from my cold, dead, cholesterol-soaked hands. There are simply no good vegan substitutes for cheese, though some of the meatless "meats" are quite tasty.

Speaking of the US riffing off the UK, and cheese, I found this on the internet, so I don't know who to attribute it to. But it's relevant:

Sweet dreams are made of cheese
Who am I to dis a Brie
I cheddar the world and a Feta cheese
Everybody's looking for Stilton

Though someone went on to do a complete parody of the song  , and it's hilarious, especially because I can't stand the original.

In closing, you know how YouTube generates recommended videos whenever you're there? Well, when I watched the video that prompted this entry (you'll have to click on the contest link above to get a link to it), this was the top recommendation. Not really relevant to cheese (the history of both cheese and domestic cats seems to be traced the Fertile Crescent at about the same time, though this is probably a coincidence), but YouTube has me pegged: it's definitely relevant to my interests: