Pondering string cheese.

It says, "Real cheese!" on the plastic wrapper of my string cheese dairy product.

This concerns me.

Call me crazy, but when I buy a product called string cheese, I am going to assume that the product I will be consuming is, in fact, cheese. I don't really need to be told that string cheese is made from cheese.

Yet the company that produces my delicious afternoon snack feels the need to reassure its consumers that they really mean it when they name their products. Not only is this string cheese, it is string cheese made from real cheese. Ingenious.

However, these words say much more to me than just real cheese. Those two words tell me that the company is worried. That the company assumes that their consumer needs to be told that they are actually eating cheese. This is either a comment on the quality of their product or a comment on the stupidity of the average American string cheese consumer.

Or it could be a placebo effect of sorts. They tell me it is real cheese, I believe it to be real cheese, I eat it and think I have consumed real cheese and will now feel the benefits of a healthy diet with the appropriate amount of dairy. However, perhaps it is not real cheese at all, and I haven't had my daily recommended dose of dairy.

Those bastards. Now I don't know who to trust.

I mean, it's not really natural for cheese to come apart in such neat little strings, is it? Surely real cheese wouldn't consent to be peeled like a common banana. Real cheese prefers to be chunked, even melted, not stringed. There has to be some sort of genetic or chemical engineering going on there.

Then they slap on that slogan, real cheese!, not bothering to get FDA approval, and proceed to make millions. And we, the consumers, slurp down string chemically-altered-former-dairy-product like the animals we are.

Will my sudden epiphanies stop me from buying string cheese? Has the string cheese industry lost the support of one formerly dedicated customer?

Hell, no! This stringy stuff, whatever it's made from, is delicious.