Dear Cheese,
These are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write to a food
product, but I have to be honest with you and with myself, and tell you that
it’s over between us.
We had an amazing run, Cheese. From those innocent days of
Kraft singles and string cheese through those experimental college years of
Stilton and Gruyere, you’ve been a constant in my life – the first food I ever
truly loved.
I remember discovering goat cheese and thinking that I had
tasted Heaven. Some snickered when a girlfriend declared, “Havarti tastes like
sex.” But I didn’t snicker. I knew exactly what she meant.
You were sweet. You were salty. With blue, veiny abandon,
you were sometimes a bit nasty. My mother warned me that you were bad for me, but
that just made me want you more. I had you first thing in the morning, spread
out on my bagel, and I twirled you around my tongue atop pasta any evening I
thought I could get away with it. I loved it when you were soft, and oh, how I
loved it when you were hard.
But I can’t go on like this.
I’m of Ashkenazi descent, Cheese, and there’s this thing called
familial hypercholesterolemia that affects my people with a greater frequency
than the rest of the world. (You knew, the first time I refused a cheeseburger,
that religion would eventually come between us.) I’m at an increased risk
of having my heart broken by you… well, not broken so much as stopped. Clogged
up with cholesterol.
I have to protect myself; I’m a married woman and
a mother. I can’t just go about, cavorting with any food product I like, as
though there were no consequences.
