Memoirs of a cheese addict

Emily Prendergast

Clouds of fragrant cheese are floating all around me. Swiss cheese covers the ground, while the walls are full of orange cheddar and crumbly parmesan. I reach out to touch a block of white gouda, grasp it, and take a huge bite. Suddenly, a gigantic yellow monster made of American cheese grabs me, holds me up, and leers at me with its provolone eyes. I scream, terrified, and then realize that instead of being scared, I can just eat his hand and he’ll drop me.

“Thud.”

I wake up, mystified – I’ve just tripped over my kitchen chair. Realizing that I must have been sleepwalking, I rub the sleep out of my eyes and walk over to the refrigerator to find a snack. All that dreaming about cheese has made me pretty hungry.

Cheese is a great snack food. I eat it all the time – American, Swiss, cheddar, asiago and mozzarella are some of my favorites.

What many people don’t realize about cheese is that it originated in prehistoric times. Can you imagine a brontosaurus walking around, a chunk of provolone hanging out of its mouth? That’s a pretty amusing visual to me.

Another thing people always seem to forget about cheese is its nutritional value. Cheese can be an important part of a daily diet. Almost all cheeses have high amounts of calcium and beneficial vitamins. Although it may not be an ideal food for dieters, I am an anti-diet person, so that really doesn’t apply to me. Cheese is, in the long run, a healthy food to eat.

The cheese industry has made some great technological improvements since the prehistoric age. New products such as Easy Cheese and string cheese (two of my all-time favorites, by the way) have revolutionized the way cheese is eaten.

Yum. As I think about cheese some more, I begin to doze off again. . . .

I’m running from the gigantic cheese monster, who is now missing a hand. As he starts to close in on me, I duck behind a door of goat cheese and watch him stumble stupidly by. I spot a mouth-watering piece of pepper-jack cheese and dash over to it, scooping it up and devouring it in one swift motion. I then run back out the door with my arms full of cheese, screaming victoriously at the back of the cheese monster, “Long live the cheese!”