3 posts from October 2006

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.

This is a question that has been weighing heavily on my mind for many long days now.

How do other countries know when to stop wearing white, so as to avoid committing one of the most grievous fashion faux-pas known to man?

In the U.S. it's simple. You are allowed to wear white between Easter (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox) and Labor Day (the first Monday in September). In other countries, it cannot be this black-and-white.

Do they observe the white season from the first day of spring until the last day of summer? Do they use their own Labor/Labour Days as the benchmarks?

In the Southern Hemisphere, is it completely reversed? Do they wear white from Labor Day until Easter?

Is it only Americans who understand and acknowledge that white is a color that cannot be worn year-round? That to wear a white skirt to a fall dinner party would bring on waves of outrage and pity from the fashionistas in the room? If so, the knowledge must be spread. Abuse of the color white must be stopped!

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, and you are reading this, and you are wearing white, you must take it off right now.

And if you happen to be an attractive male who just stripped out of his white pants, you must take pictures. It's all about spreading the knowledge.