In which I get sweary about pre-grated cheese.

 

Photo by mia!
Photo by mia!

One of my comfort foods is whole-wheat macaroni with vegetables. Since I am a lazy cook and reluctant dishwasher I have always just grated cheese and sprinkled it on top of the noodles then stirred it into a clumpy and unevenly distributed mess.

I have only made a cheese sauce twice before, and both times were after being roundly mocked by loved ones for my brutish standard of living.

But if there is one thing the Small and Delicious Life is about, it is enjoying the making of life as much as the consumption. So last night I made a cheese sauce. It was delightful and fun to make—truly 400% better than my bestial and unevenly melted grated cheese. Furthermore, there seem to be alchemical reactions between butter and milk and a shake of flour—this has all the makings of a lovely internet wormhole.

As is my modus operandi, I googled and opened a bunch of browser tabs on how to make a cheese sauce, and one of those posts caused me to lose my mind.

When will it stop? When will this whole bloated shit-show just implode from the weight of our idiocy? You see, when you buy pre-grated cheese, it is covered with anti-clumping and anti-fungal agents.

Of course it is. As anybody who has grated a nice cheddar knows, it will clump like crazy. And so, in order to have the convenience of not having to bend your arm at the elbow, Industrial Products Inc. must lacquer each shred of cheese with cellulose—wood flour—and various other Better Living Through Chemistry Gross Domestic Product Enhancers. Hey, here is an idea—want to prevent your cheese from clumping? Simply grate it fresh from the Mother Clump—the bloody block it was made in.

I am sputtering with anger as I try to write this, and struggling to keep the profanity to a minimum in case my lovely old grandmother wanders onto this webpage. But what the hell?

I just want some cheese. I like it on my toast, I like it on pizza, I like it in sandwiches, I like it on pasta, and I like it on crackers. I am a man that is very happy with bread and cheese—I love both bread and cheese. I really like cheese.

What I do not want is anti-fungal chemicals that are used to manage the stupidity of pre-grated cheese.

This is really about surface area. A block of cheese does not have very much surface area. If a little mould gets started, you just cut it off and eat the rest. But when you increase the surface area an order of magnitude by grating it in a giant factory, then you put it in sealed plastic bags, drop them in a box and ship them around the continent—well, you can see how mould will grow.

Of course, since you have just carefully powdered each and every shred of your stupid pre-grated cheese, the last thing you want to do it mash it down again. And so each bag has lots of air in it, and each box has to be big enough to hold all those bags of air around all that fluffed up cheese. And so now we are wasting fuel, cardboard and plastic, all so we can eat some anti-fungals and wood flour on our fucking nachos.

 

Man. I am sorry Grandma. I lost it there. Still, it is not like you don’t know I am from the sweary side of the family—I do keep a lid on it when we visit. Love you!

 

How did I come across all this? Because there were several warnings that pre-grated cheese does not make good cheese sauce—you can’t cook with it properly. Small surprise really since it is no longer cheese, it is some sort of monstrous cheesewood. Perhaps you can panel your rec room.

Hey, just for kicks, why don’t you google ‘listeria grated cheese’? That’s right—if you want to get sick there is no better way than industrial ‘food’. Factory widgets for dinner—what could go wrong?

So. This is the world we have built—a world in which it makes sense to industrially grate cheese at a greatly increased risk of sickness, coat it with poisons and wood dust, bag it and box it and ship at great fuel cost, in order to use it only in a smaller range of ‘foods’.

And that is all I have to say about that.

 

2 Comments

  1. Ha! Thank you for this. My sisters both stock their fridges with pre-grated cheese and it drives me nuts. Ironically, they both militantly avoided raw milk cheeses while pregnant because, listeria.

  2. Let’s not even start down this path because then I would have to remind you what we spray on our fruits, which are supposed to be fresh, just to make sure they look right. And then, if I headed that direction, I would have to mention the frankenfruits we are genetically modifying so they don’t turn brown when they are rotten. Excuse me if I like my fruit to rot when it’s past it’s prime…

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