Queso

I’m sitting on my supple leather sofa, waiting for that simple phone call that will deliver the sweet words of “you’re getting paid.” But the past week has shown me that this country and its inhabitants aren’t really that big on work efficiency, and I’ve definitely got some time to kill.

So let’s talk about aerosol cheese products. On the one hand, spray cheese was a truly innovative product in its heyday, the ultimate display of American speed, whereby we were able to get our cheese from point A to point B much faster than by any normal human conveyance. And with a market that only contained spray whip cream, it seemed to help open the door for more spray-possible items. Cream cheese? A nice peanut butter/jelly combo perhaps, designed in similar style to Aquafresh? But on the other hand, it’s cheese….in a spray can.

Now, I know there’s the whole astronaut influence in the design of weird foods like this, but I think the food companies use that as a safety net in case their product totally bombs on the open market. Like astronaut ice cream. Many of my close friends can attest to, though never fully understand, my deep, deep love for astronaut ice cream. But even I know that the stuff tastes like a combination of street chalk and a container of Friendly’s Neapolitan ice cream after it’s been opened, left in the freezer for a few months, so it’s actually passed the “freezer burn” phase, and is now exists in ice cream hell, all tacky and gluey. There’s a reason you can only buy it at science museums. There you’ve got your only viable market: the young kids who don’t know what proper flavor is, and the parents who are desperate to shut them up for a few minutes. So it helps that astronaut ice cream coats your mouth, leaving you both speechless because it tastes so bad, but also because of the artificial flavors have completely coated your vocal cords.

God I love that crap.

But I’ve written a lot about ice cream lately, so let’s get back to the spray cheese. I was first introduced to “alternative cheeses” by my friend Mike back in college. He had a soft spot for this port-flavored cheese spread, which looked like a swirled version of what comes back up after drinking too many pineapple and strawberry daiquiris. It was, however, a disturbingly delicious combo when paired with a Wheat Thin, and it also had the added benefit of not being from the dining hall. If memory serves me correctly, it had to be labeled cheese spread, because it didn’t contain enough natural integrity to be called simply “cheese.” Velveeta comes to mind just now, which I’ve forever memorized as “pasteurized processed cheese food.” That’s a classic in my mind….bricks of cheese the color of A-Rod’s skin, with that ever-so-slight wobbliness, but with a density such that the National Guard could to use them to bolster the levees during floods. Or make some pillboxes out of them if we ever engage with that cheese war I’ve spoken of before. Mexico would be stuck with their pepper-flecked queso, the kind that comes in #10 cans and is forever liquid, no matter what you do to it. Bullet beats queso, but Velveeta beats bullet. It’s simple math.

But like beer that uses geometric shapes as a marketing strategy (why would you buy something because it comes in a cube? Ok, the fried onion loaf (read: brick) at Frank’s Steakhouse in Porter Sq. may be an exception), I believe that graduation from college signifies a graduation from the sophomoric foods as well. Gone should be the spray cheese…we should be forced to cut our cheese. With knives. That we can now afford. Because we have jobs! That we celebrate by eating cheese! With knives! See how it all comes together?

If only my friends felt the same; sadly, they do not. One evening shortly before my move to the U.K., I cleaned out my friend Aaron’s cupboards, which was like looking into a culinary time capsule that dated back to “Ought 1”, as he would say. And low and behold, somewhere between the Ought 2 and Ought 3 layers of food, there was the EZ Cheese, its nozzle crusted over in rust-colored artificial flavor, its NASA-endorsed contents waiting to be released upon the world once again. It was so old, in fact, that it said CFCs were a good thing, and added to the cheddar flavor. I’m kidding. But the scary part? According to the expiration date, it was still good to eat.

Apparently the folks at Nabisco and I vary GREATLY on our definitions of “good.”