You know how the cheese section of a supermarket will offer small pieces of cheese for sale, an ounce or two per piece? Maybe they'll be in a wicker basket or something like that, a bunch of all different sorts of cheese. Maybe the supermarket does that because they have small pieces left over after cutting the cheese up into the more normally-sized pieces. Or maybe they offer the small pieces in order to entice customers to try new things. Or maybe both, or maybe something else.
Be that as it may, Whole Foods donates some of these small pieces of cheese to the local food bank. A nice lady who works at the food bank has noticed that I really like these fancy pieces of cheese from Whole Foods, and apparently there's not a lot of demand for this stuff generally at the food bank, and so, the last few times I've gone to the food bank, as soon as she sees me coming, this nice lady goes and gets me a few pieces of wonderful, exotic, expensive, stinky cheese. mee r stinkee cheez munkee.
When I get my precious home, I unwrap the small pieces of cheese and put the cheese into plastic refrigerator containers. Am I doing it wrong, by putting different sorts of fine cheese into one container? Am I ruining everything? Are true cheese connoisseurs in anguish as they read this? (Am I flattering myself to think that a true cheese connoisseur has ever been within a mile of reading anything I've written?) I don't know. As I unwrap them, I note the brand and the price per pound of each piece of cheese, and then I quickly forget most of that information.
If my memory were better, or if I had written down the name and price of each brand of cheese before throwing the wrapper away, this would be a much more informative and interesting post. And yet, here we are. If I ever get any more of the fancy cheese from the food bank, maybe I'll actually manage to add an informative PS to this post. I promise nothing! [PS, 16. June 2020: And today's the day! I got two pieces of stinky cheese from the the food bank, and I remembered not to throw the wrappers away. One of the pieces is Jasper Hill Farm Cabot Clothbound Cheddar and sells for $25.99 per pound at Whole Foods, and the other piece, also donated by Whole Foods, Is Jasper Hill Farm Alpha Tolman and sells for $24.99 a pound. It looks and smells a bit like Gruyere (which I've also gotten from the food bank). The manufacturer recommends Tolman for melting. I don't remember having seen either of these particular varieties before. I'm melting a piece of Tolman on a cracker... Very nice. The texture of the melted Tolman is reminiscent of Gruyere, and the flavor is a bit more intense. Very nice. As for the Clothbound Cheddar, a website devoted to cheese recommends pairing it with charcuterie. Cracker, cheddar, hot dog... Hmm, maybe I wasn't doing that right. Or maybe I needed to cleanse my palate after the Tolman. I'll keep an open mind about this cheddar.]
I try not to eat too much cheese. Even when it's really delicious. And it seems that, generally speaking, I like cheese better the more expensive it is -- another good reason for me to be a billionaire! -- and some of the little information from the thrown-away cheese wrappers which I have retained is that four of those little pieces of cheese -- at least four. Maybe five, or more -- sell at Whole Foods for $29.99 a pound. And at least one more cost $27.99 per pound.
Now, readers, maybe, for some of you, $30 a pound is not a lot for cheese. For me, $30 a pound is the most expensive cheese I've ever seen. And I know that some of you will be astounded to learn that cheese can cost so much. Astounded and perhaps also outraged, for all I know.
But like I said, for me, as a general rule, the more cheese costs, the better it tastes. Also, since I've been getting the fancy stinky cheese from the food bank, I've been researching cheese a little bit, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and so I think I know a little bit about those $30-a pound cheeses:
-- One was a goat cheese with pieces of truffles in it. I was worried about this piece of cheese, because I'd eaten other, much cheaper things which supposedly had truffles in them, and gotten headaches from eating them. But in retrospect, I suspect those other things may have had very little truffle, and a lot of artificial additive to try to fake the taste of truffles, and probably the additives gave me the headaches. Anyway, now, after eating this $29.99-a-pound cheese, I may actually have some real idea of what truffles taste like, and I didn't get headaches.
-- Another $29.99-per-pound cheese reminded me a bit of brie, it was white and had a similar softness and mild flavor, but was better than any brie I've ever had.
-- Another one was a blue cheese. It's the only blue cheese I've ever seen that is orange except for the delicious blue pieces of mold which give blue cheese its name. It was orange, and more soft and pliant than crumbly, and it was sticky, and I remember that its name definitely sounded English, and it was hard to keep from just gobbling it down, without even putting it on a cracker or anything, just gobbling it down by itself, it was so good.
As for further $29.99-per-pound packages, I can't remember if one was another package of the same mild white variety which is sort of like brie but better. (Unless, of course, there are other, more expensive sorts of brie which I've never had and I can't even imagine how delicious they are.)
I admire the vegans, I really do. And I completely believe them when they talk about the health benefits of vegan diets. I have eyes. I can see how good-looking they are, how healthy, how clear-skinned.
But on the other hand -- for instance, stinky cheese.
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