Essay
THE ODYSSEY A man’s cheese-filled journey from bachelorhood to fatherhood
words by nathaniel g. moore illustration by maria centola puts it in his salads, and I’m not talking about a Caesar: he cuts up cubes…sorry, it’s too much, I’m feeling a bit sick thinking about a large, glistening salad my brother once tried to make me with small squares of cheese hiding within the sad dressing-soaked lettuce leaves. But that’s his cheddar cross to bear. We all have our cheesy demons.
I have far too many memories of sneaking cheese from my family’s refrigerator as a teenager. I was a scrawny kid who played outside a lot (road hockey, bike rides, tobogganing, and other typical pre-internet kid activities popular in the 1980s). My mother fed us well, though we didn’t always enjoy her cooking—I can still recall my younger brother nearly in tears trying to get through a main course he
Over the last decade, I’ve noticed that my relationship with cheese has changed dramatically. I’m eating less of it, but for different reasons. I still love it when I do indulge, but I’ve noticed major changes in my overall consumption since starting a family. Whether or not I eat cheese at the same rate as I did in previous incarnations of myself is now an economic decision, because the less cheese I eat, the more my wife and daughter can enjoy.
george: “I was free and clear. I was living the dream.
I was stripped to the waist eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery.” jerry: “Before we go any further, I’d just like to point
Despite its colossal price here in B.C. (I remember the first time I saw a brick of cheese for $13.50 on Vancouver Island and nearly cried), not a week goes by that we are not stocking up on cream cheese, brick cheese, cottage cheese, cheese sticks for our daughter’s lunch, and parmesan cheese for our pasta. Cheese is the penultimate ingredient at any given time in our household.
out how disturbing it is that you equate eating a block of cheese with some sort of bachelor paradise.”
—seinfeld episode “the foundation”
Something that I once sawed off a hunk of after gazing into the refrigerator for several minutes, too lazy to create a full meal, is now a sacred food item. I have a deeper relationship with our domestic mascot—or rather, the fourth member of our one-child family. We eat goat cheese on crackers, we spread cream cheese on bagels (well, they do), we shake it over pasta, and my wife melts it for a sauce on cabbage.
later described as “bad breath meat.” This phantom meat was a recurring character during our treacherous dinner hours, and cheese was in many ways our salvation. It glistened against the equally shiny ham and mustard nestled in bread. This was the standard snack back then—something we’d make ourselves after school or, in some cases, after meals. We’d use generous proportions of ham and cheese, dislodge a kosher dill pickle from the bulbous jar, and add a noisy squirt of mustard. And like with most kids, when it was time for parmesan cheese on pasta, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. The trick was to shake more cheese over our plates when mom or dad wasn’t looking. Years later, as a single guy, cheese was still a staple—though since I was the one paying for it, depending on my fiscal reality at the time, it was a fluctuating ration. I was the one who would control the inventory and, much like George Constanza’s portrayal of himself as a widow in paradise eating cheese, I was king of the wheel, the chief investment officer for every block of mild, old, and marble that I negotiated. If I could afford it on a given week, I’d certainly eat a whole block in a matter of days. As adults in our thirties and forties, my brother and I would meet up at his home, and it was then that I discovered his love of cheese was still running wild. He even
-
Occasionally it’s even a behavioural bargaining tool, a panacea to a restless daughter who, on the morning after a tree fell through our bathroom ceiling, refused to take a nap following a considerable night of bad sleep. Within the nanosecond time span that the single-syllabled noun jettisoned in all caps from my wife’s lips amongst this sentence, “If you take a nap I’ll make you your own CHEESE pizza,” our daughter had rolled over and begun her quest for rest. After going vegan three years ago, my dear friend Spencer Gordon, a writer who lives in Toronto, found that cheese was the most difficult ingredient to strike from his regular diet. “Like everyone else, I used to eat an abundance of cheese. After going vegan, I realized I put, or ate, cheese on nearly everything,” he says. “Cutting it from my diet was more difficult than dropping meat (blame the casein).” Gordon says that going vegetarian made him lose 10 to 15 pounds, and going vegan helped him shed another 10. But is losing weight really worth severing my ties to cheese completely? The thing is, in my household, a simple plate of cheese and crackers—a popular weekend snack—is in fact so much more. Once we bite in, we know it plain and simple: cheese is a major source of comfort for us. All of us.
22
-