As we find ourselves going into year three of “The Pandemic” and month two of “The Ukraine War” which is angling to become a full-blown “Nuclear World War Three” I think I speak for many people who have given up on things going back to “Normal” and are now looking to ground themselves in any way they can to something that at least has some consistency.
We all know that this is not an easy task. We have all heard the ubiquitous maxim that states “the only constant in life is change” which of course is never comforting to someone who is looking for something solid to ground themselves with.
A recent health emergency allowed me to do some opiate influenced navel gazing and I have come to a surprising epiphany. I have realized that there IS one thing that is a constant and that one thing is more comforting than any other constant previously proposed.
I posit that the constant that everyone can depend on for comfort is in fact CHEESE!
“Cheese”, you say?!
Indeed! Recently while I was pondering the delicious wonder that is cheese, I started to wonder who had been the first person to conceive of cheese. I couldn’t find a logical way for cheese to have come into existence.
I mean think of it, someone had to either intentionally or unintentionally leave their milk alone with an acid until it curdled and then turned itself into a solid then somehow that person had to decide to taste this new solid in order to find out that cheese is in fact glorious.
How could this have possibly gone down?
Was it some kind of culinary experiment? Did an aspiring chef from long ago decide to see what would happen if they left their milk to go solid and think “Wow this milk is going bad… lets save it for a while and when it finally turns solid, we will eat it and see if it tastes good.”
Was it more of an accident? Did someone take a swig out of their milk jug only to find their mouth full of chunks and think “Oh man this milk has gone bad… –wait for it– … oh wow this is actually good!”
Was it a dare? A bunch of people were out on some sort of mission and one of them noticed that their milk had gone solid and said “Hey guys! This milk has been carried around in a flask long enough that it got chunky…. I dare you to eat some of it…”
No matter which way you look at it there are logistical problems with any explanation of how someone either discovered or invented cheese.
It was because of this that I decided I would dedicate some of my free time to finding out what the history of cheese actually is. A quick Google search and scan of some sites including Wikipedia confirms that the origin story of cheese is in fact quite elusive. It turns out that nobody actually knows how or why or where cheese comes from.
There was never a point during recorded history that does not in fact have some sort of reference to the existence of cheese. Cheese actually predates known history entirely. There are some speculations on how or where someone may have created cheese but that’s all it is, guesses.
Therefore, as far as we know, there has always been cheese.
We all know that cheese is amazing.
Whether soft or hard, cold or melted it is hard to go wrong when you add cheese to your meal. (I personally think that melty cheese is one of the best tastes in the world.) Pinky from Pinky and the Brain even sings a song about cheese and how it is the “Taste that Pleases” from all around the world.
Even people who do not eat or drink milk products seem to do everything they can to try and simulate both cheese and cheesiness. So, it is rational to assume that even if we all suddenly have to adapt to an unconventional food source there will be many motivated people working feverishly to create cheesy goodness somehow. It is because of this that I honestly think I am hard pressed to imagine a future without cheese.
It is therefore possible that the everlasting constant in this universe could indeed be cheese!
Now, I hear some of you saying that God is supposed to be the eternal unmoved mover in this universe, but I dare ask which is more comforting when the world is going to crap, hope of an eventual salvation? or a gooey triple cheese stuffed crust pizza (pineapple optional)?
I’m not yet sure that I should go so far as to say that Cheese is somehow equivalent to God but to be fair, I have heard cheese being referred to as heavenly so maybe it is somehow sent from God to foreshadow our eternal comfort. (One first class ticket straight to hell thanks!)
Anyway!
My goal of finding some sort of constant on which to ground myself during all the chaos and uncertainty we all have been feeling over the past few years seems to be accomplished in the discovery of the abiding glory of cheese.
Cheese has always been there for me and has never let me down and there is no reason to believe that there will not be cheesiness for the rest of my future.
This is a writerly delight!! And I now feel much better knowing that there is a constant in this insane world.