A HISTORY OF CHEESE

The Book that Thinks It's a Pack of Cheese Slices says that nobody knows exactly when cheese came into existence but that it was almost certainly the result of an accident.

I don't like this information. I would like to think that as an intelligent species we could have thought of something as brilliant as cheese with our brains. Not just stumbled upon it when some sodded dairy hand left a bucket of milk out in.. churning... fermenting... hmm. How embarrassing, I don't actually know how it's made. Well, this is why we're here, people.


A brief history of cheese is as follows:

Apparently, cheese evolved nearly 4000 years ago with the domestication of goats and cows, when the sodded dairy hand or whoever did the stumbling, stored milk in a container made from the stomach of an animal. The milk then reacted with traces of rennet in the animal's stomach lining, causing it to separate into salty, solid curds and liquid whey, from which different types of cheeses are made.

Wow, ok, I don't know if I even wanted to know that. And I'm seeing Little Miss Muffet in a whole new light.


My history of cheese begins as follows:

When I was a young lass of five I happened upon an unsupervised grater on the kitchen bench. My personal investigations into the grater revealed a mound of shiny cheese slivers, and beside the grater, a square lump of cheese wrapped in aluminium foil. Soon my sticky fingers had reduced the mound considerably, so I high-tailed it outta there before anyone was the wiser (a skill that still comes in handy today when foolhardy people leave chocolate lying around).

The next day at school I told Katy Novak about this incredible cheese I'd discovered. She asked me what kind of cheese it was and I authoritatively informed her it was Silver Foil Cheese. Later that week, Katy Novak told me she had been to the supermarket and had searched high and low, but just couldn't find the Silver Foil Cheese. This had us both stumped.

The obsession continued with the discovery of La Vache Qui Rit. (For the uninitiated, La VacheQui Rit ('Laughing Cow') is a processed, non-foodlike edible substance masquerading as cheese. You don't even have to refrigerate the stuff, it's creepy.) The little individually-wrapped portions of this 'cheese' would appear regularly in my Year 1 colleague Joanne Knoll's lunchbox. My lunchbox had celery sticks and Vegemite sandwiches (well done Mum) but if I ever coveted anything with a covetous covet, it was Joanne Knoll's slimy little wedges of heaven.

And so of course, La Vache Qui Rit became one of those foods in my life - an idee fixe food, if you like - something you wanted so bad as a kid but were rarely able to indulge in, so now you're stuck in this mindset that it's the best food ever and when you get your hands on it you have to eat a whole pack/box/carton at once.

Not that I would ever, EVER, eat a whole family pack of La Vache Qui Rit in a day, I mean that's just disgusting.