by Amare Biggers “A Pickle Polemic”

CHEESE: A POLEMIC

Amare Biggers

When I was younger, I used to dread the thought of going to birthday parties, eating out with my team after my games, or simply just staying over at a friend’s house. It wasn’t because I was antisocial or that I didn’t like the idea of fun—whether I knew what would happen at each of these events: pizza would be served. Don’t get me wrong I love pizza, but I can’t say the same for that oddly stretchy, wet carpet smelling, greasy yellow substance on top.1

I would take a fork or knife or whatever was available to me and scrape off the cheese; and nevertheless, I was always looked at the same way. The way your grandmother would look at you if you dropped the f-bomb at the dinner table. After a while, one tends to get tired of having to explain themselves at every outing. Even to this day, I hate mentioning this embarrassing fact about myself to someone

1Now I know what some of you are thinking, that I’ve never had good cheese or good pizza, and you’re right! I’m just kidding, I actually have had “good pizza.” When I went to visit the University of Columbia in New York, I was a junior in high school. By this point in my life, it had been years since a piece of yellow death touched my lips. With this being the case and me being in the most famous city in the world for pizza I figured I would give it one more chance. I went to Joe’s Pizza, the best spot for pizza in the whole city, confirmed by almost everyone I met at a bodega. Don’t believe me? Look it up. While eating Joe’s in the middle of time square I came to a conclusion: I have never hated the taste of cheese more in my life. The rest of the pizza was the shit though.

new because it almost always comes with a dramatic “What!” followed by a disturbed look.

Don’t get me wrong, I deserve any criticism that comes my way. I know I’m weird and I have accepted that. After all, what kind of person doesn’t like a nice melty slice of cheese to drape over their food?

There are only a few movies from my childhood that live in my head rent-free. Some of them stuck because they were either something I was too young to watch, or they were native to Disney Channel. At the top of my list was Ratatouille.

Ratatouille is set in none other than the magical city of Paris, France. In the movie there is a scene towards the beginning where Remy and his brother Emile are scavenging for food. Remy comes across a mushroom, cheese (Tomme de Chevre to be specific,) and rosemary. Remy immediately cooks the three items as one using a lightning strike as a DIY stove. He exclaims, “Each flavor was totally unique, but combine one flavor with another and something new was created!”

During my first-time watching Ratatouille, I had never seen something that looked so mouthwateringly good, I could almost smell and taste it through the screen. So, what did I do? Well of course later that day I begged my mom to take me to the store because I wanted to “taste the Ratatouille cheese!” If only reality met my expectations, this was the day that scarred me for life.

I nearly cried when I tasted the “Ratatouille cheese” it tasted nothing as I Imagined. The whole experience was traumatic, to say the least. And if you thought this was something you should have seen my reaction when I thought cheese came from “cow pee”; I nearly fainted. In the movie, they made cheese to be something magical, something that embodied the elegant and sophisticated atmosphere of Paris. Paris is famous for its bustling museums and galleries, top cuisine, beautiful architecture, and chic fashion. From its iconic cafés to famous monuments like Versailles and the Eiffel Tower, the city has so much to offer! With all this being said I don’t see how cheese makes the cut.

Cheese has a great influence in France. It can be found almost everywhere, in the supermarkets and in the openair stalls of the marketplace. Cheese boards are on the menu of almost every restaurant. But I just don’t get it. How can something so odd, smelly, and downright distasteful be elegant?

Unlike a truffle which you can also find in Paris, cheese has nothing special about it. Some cheeses are even meant to be consumed with mold! If someone told you to eat something with mold on it, you would probably look at them like they’ve lost it. It’s not even real food, it’s in a category of its own.

I now realize that I am confused because I don’t get the notion of how cheese became a food to begin with. Unlike cheese, milk is natural and comes out of a cow or goat as, well, milk. But cheese is just the end result of an experiment with milk that went way too far. Take goat cheese for example or as the goats call it, cheese. I have never fathomed how someone just looked at something that favors a dog that smokes meth and said, “Hmm that would make good cheese.” I could go on forever about the different types of cheese, take cottage cheese, the stuff looks like edible cellulite.

I can’t attribute my hatred for cheese to my parents or anyone else in my family for that matter. They consume the stuff like it is crack. For starters, my mom loves Mexican food, so cheese is inevitable. And my dad would drive from Nashville to Boston for a good cheeseburger as if the cheese is what makes the burger. I remember back in high school—on Fridays, my friends and I would go to Sonic after school before we had to be back to watch a film for the football game later that night. Every