CHEESE IS NOT DISGUSTING!!!
In fact, As far as I can remember I’ve always loved cheese. The first specific cheese I remember enjoying was “Vache Qui Rit” (“The Laughing Cow”), which I discovered in first grade when my family lived in France. I loved pulling the red string that opened the round box and seeing the foil-wrapped wedges of cheese which could only be accessed by pulling another red string which unwrapped the foil, and then popping the entire gob into my mouth. I think I was supposed to smear them on a slice of bread, but I never did. Or at least I didn’t like it as much when I did. Looking back on it, that’s probably because “Vache Qui Rit” doesn’t have much taste, so why ruin that luscious rubbery wedge with a slice of bread? I did, however, enjoy spreading “Boursin” on a slice of bread, and licking the creamy-garlicky-foil once the rest of the cheese was finished. Another cheese memory I have was from when my family moved back to America and, it being the 1970s, my mother would buy bags full of “American Cheese” that were shaped and individually wrapped like candy. I would grab these by the handful, unwrap them, and gleefully pop them one-by-one into my mouth. But I also remember thinking that the cheese itself was neither as creamy as Vache Qui Rit nor as tasty as Boursin. By the 1980s my favorite cheese was American, Colby, or Cheddar, so long as it was orange and came pre-sliced. The slices were no doubt intended to go onto sandwiches—grilled cheese sandwiches were particularly popular at the time—but I preferred simply eating the slices straight up.
It was not until I moved to France after college that my taste in cheese became more sophisticated, and the cheese that first expanded my horizons was Camembert au lait crus. That is, raw milk Camembert that, once purchased, is stored outside the refrigerator until it becomes soft and smelly. Once I got hooked on that I began to try other French cheeses. When two college friends of mine came to visit me in Paris, I sent them to the grocery store with a list of items to purchase, including cheese. They were so flummoxed by the myriad cheese options in the grocery store that they came home with everything but the cheese. They were also laughing because while staring blankly at the shelves full of cheeses, and realizing that they couldn’t make a decision about something so mysterious, they had invented a little jingle that made fun of themselves, and me: “With Chad the cheese is chosen.”
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