Immortal Milk by Eric LeMay

Author:Eric LeMay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Slow Food might be growing into an international power, but from our spot in the crowd, it looked like what Slow Food had attained—by preserving traditional foods and bringing us together to celebrate and eat them at Cheese!—was the power to spread joy.

Long live the revolution!

Feeling Cheesy

Across America, you can rent a multitiered cheese fountain to celebrate any occasion, “including,” as Choco Fountain Inc.’s Web site explains, “wedding receptions, birthdays, dessert buffets, catered events, banquets, class reunions, family reunions, Bar Mitzvahs and more.” Nacho or Cheddar cheese bubbles down the fountain’s tiers in a thick yellow current. You catch it with a corn chip or other “dipping item”:

Cocktail Weiners, Meatballs, Bread Sticks, Assorted Breads, Pretzels, Chicken Wings, Taquitos, Chicken Tenders, Cheese Cubes, Potato Wedges, Cubed Smoked Ham, Sliced Sausage, Steak Cubes, Potato Chips, Baby Carrots, Cherry Tomatoes, Cauliflower, Broccoli Florets, Radishes, Celery Stalks, Pineapple, Red, Yellow, Orange & Green Pepper Strips, Etc.

The fountain comes with long skewers that reduce the risk of cheese splurting on your bridal gown or Steelers jersey. The mini, three-tiered model rents for $149.99 and includes access to a 24-hour support line.

If dipping cheese cubes into melted cheese doesn’t entice you, you might consider donning a Cheesehead hat, a pair of cheese earrings, or a cheese necktie (“For the executive with everything”). Attired in cheese, you can groove to jazz musician Han Bennink improvising on drums made of real and fake cheese or watch performance artist Cosimo Cavallaro cover iconic supermodel Twiggy in spray cheese. You can also snuggle up with the business bestseller Who Moved My Cheese? and learn, through an allegory in which cheese stands for happiness and success, how you can handle change. (“The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you can enjoy new cheese.”) You might finish the book feeling so good that you point your camera at yourself and say, “Cheese!”

Cheesiness surrounds us, and if you consider all the cheesy things that have nothing to do with cheese—Hallmark cards, Harlequin covers, Kodak moments, a cappella groups, gold-dipped roses, any emotion fit for a musical—it can feel as though cheesiness engulfs us.

But what is cheesy? When we say, “That’s so cheesy,” what do we mean and why does cheese, yummy and innocent cheese, convey our meaning? What do we feel when we feel cheesy?

“Inferior, poor.”

My Webster’s Pocket Dictionary didn’t help. Its definition of “cheesy” is inferior and poor, but not cheesy.

I needed more than a pocket’s worth of dictionary power. I grabbed a hefty, Herculean tome and looked up “cheesy” again: “Of poor quality; shoddy.” That wasn’t much better. Another dictionary gave me “shabby” and “cheap,” but not “poor.” The inconsistency surprised me. Curious, I checked out about twenty more definitions from different dictionaries. I wanted to see if the lexicographers agreed.

They did and they didn’t, and as I tried to track their slight differences on a scrap of paper, it occurred to me that I could transform them into a digitized word cloud. You’ve probably seen one: an image made of different words of different sizes.

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