in defense of monterey jack cheese

Monterey jack cheese doesn't really need my defense. But there's a thing I've been thinking about here lately.

I like food. I like ordinary food and I like exotic food. Sometimes I'm something of a foodie. But I don't really want to eat expensive food or much imported food. It's not just that we tend to be skating around the edges of brokeville, or that my habits for eating were set when we were truly in money trouble most of the time. There's a thing I have about good cheap food. Not Crisco in the five-gallon barrels: and not argan nut oil or camellia oil (neither of which I have seen: I just nosed around to find a couple of outre examples). Not plugra brand imported butter. Just nice-enough butter and nice-enough olive oil. Like that. Like not the sixty dollar a pound dried porcini from Someplace Else, and not truffles, but regular store mushrooms and wild mushrooms from under our own doug firs. Like that. And like monterey jack cheese.

What brings this on is the nice fellow generally agrees with me but he has a thing about expensive and obscure cheeses. He likes to buy slivers of fifteen dollar a pound cheeses. He likes themn stinky too. There's nothing wrong with this. Little French cheesemakers deserve love too, and he'll never break the bank over a five-dollar sliver of cheese, however silly I think it is as an indulgence. The things he brings home are goody, too, unless he says it's beefy, in which case you'd best take off for the slough for milder scents.

But he's thinking about cheese that way all the time now and I'm not. I'm thinking cauliflower besciamella with cheese. I'm thinking cheese and peas. I'm thinking cabbage salad with cheese in it. So I don't want a few grams of odoriferous unpronounceable with a strange but alluring dull sheen to it. I want a large chunk of good cheap monterey jack and a hunk of domestic blue and abit of economy swiss and New York extra sharp cheddar and -- well, whichever is cheaper at the moment, dry jack or domestic romano. Bulgarian feta.

I don't think I'm saying the thing I want to say. I feel cynical when I read about the good plain cooking of some frozen backwater where there's nothing green on the plate five months of the year and nobody's heard of a kumquat. I don't want to get into all that supposedly anti-elitist, anti-foodie thing where you have to embrace white food and large ribs and pretend that's democracy. And I realize it's sort of cheating to get all preincipled about local food when you're sitting right next to the spot from where most of the rest of the continent gets its asparagus and broccoli and artichokes and spinach and lettuce. But: just this thing. I'm getting satisfaction when I put together a really cool dinner and the ingredients are largely cheap and humble things, and the luxury bits are things I grew or made or foraged myself. That's all.

That's not principles. Principles is we have to re-organize the mass production of food to use resources more equitably and efficiently. Principles is dealing with the insane subsidized overuse of water and fertilizer to produce artificially inexpensive food (which still somehow manages to be out of reach for a substantial fraction of the world's people). Principles is paying the actual cost of production as the food is produced instead of deferring that payment to the indefinite future, when the dams inexorably silt up, the soil unescapably dies a crusty, foul-smelling death from a chronic overdose of artificial fertilizer and systemic pesticide, and the food stops growing. No, using Jack cheese in a broccoli kugel isn't going to save the world. However, it's just nicer to have a table piled with yummy fresh things.