Cheese Criminals
Us British are good at a few different things; not learning any other language other than English, then going on holiday in Spain and complaining, then coming back and complaining that foreign people should know fluent English when they come over here, to name but one, and making pasties, to name a second, and finding great deals on campervans for sale, to name a third. Not forgetting also our impressive record for producing terrible singers from reality TV, as well. But one thing we are rubbish at, really abysmal, is making decent cheese that is not cheddar. Or perhaps it’s not so much the making as the selling it: go to a supermarket, any supermarket in the UK, and, at the cheese shelf, you will find a plentiful supply of cheese. The problem? It’s all cheddar related. Yes, it may be EXTRA STRONG cheddar, or EXTRA MATURE FARMHOUSE cheddar, but it’s still all cheddar, or something like it. I speak of this because it was announced, three years ago, that our local supermarket was to open a new deluxe cheese shelf. And it opened this week. And guess what? It contained yet more varieties of CHEDDAR. Yes, there were a number of other cheeses, but they all looked suspiciously cheddar-like in their appearance and even the tasters they had out tasted of cheddar… Sadly, it is through the conditioning of buying cheddar and only cheddar that has left us behind the rest of the world. As soon as someone offers the average British person anything which does not in some way resemble cheddar, they run a mile, scared to death that it may actually taste of something else. It’s truly tragic. Is it any wonder that other countries view us as having no culture? Obviously there is no hard and fast solution to weaning people off their fixation with the most boring and predictable cheese in the world. It will take many, many years and it will require a great deal of pain and anguish as we enter a new phase of trying out new things. Now, as anyone knows, us British don’t like new things. We like what we know, and that’s a sad fact that is unlikely to change any time soon.
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