posted: March 14, 2003
Cheese: (n) curds of milk, separated from the whey and pressed into a solid mass, eaten as food.
Food: (n) substance taken (or intended to be) into the body to maintain life and growth, nourishment.
There is a scary product on the shelves of American supermarkets. Some of my friends call this "spray-on cheese". You know the stuff I mean: a vaguely semi-solid, school-bus-orange glop contained in a pressurized can which shoots forth like Silly String when the nozzle is pressed. If you've never seen it, it really does exist in supermarkets all over the United States and probably Canada, as well, alas for them. It's like hairspray with starch. The idea being that you're supposed to take this goo and spray in onto crackers and casseroles and hot dogs and such as an edible decoration or what-have-you. It also comes in jars, but, really, the spray-can of cheesy goo is the classic form. Many a geek and college student has survived and even thrived on this yellow-orange abomination, which makes me wonder about the state of our nation even more than the current shenanigans in New York and Washington D.C.--talk about chemical warfare....
Who thinks up this shit? The idea of this stuff just doesn't seem obvious to me. Can you imagine the guy who invented it, sitting in a meeting somewhere and saying "Hey, I know, let's take some cheese and stick it in a whipped-cream can so you can shoot it out of the top like water out of your nose! Yeah, just like Johnson is doing with his coffee, right now! No, no! I'm serious! Really! We'll make a fortune! We could call it 'areo-cheeze'!"
But what's really scary is not that someone came up with the idea of cheese in a spray-can, but that what they put in that can isn't really cheese at all; it's "Processed Cheese Food Product".
What the hell is that? I know what cheese is. It's been around forever. And then there is this other stuff....
When I was a kid (hey! it wasn't that long ago! Though, if you wanted color TV you had to break out the crayons...), there was cheese and there was Velveeta™. This was not really cheese, as it took pains regulated by law to let us know. Oh, no, not cheese, but "Processed Cheese". So, it was cheese to which something had been...done. Some sort of... processing. Hmm..., yes....
Process: (n) a systematic series of actions or operations directed to some end; (v) to preserve (food) by a process.
Why process cheese? Isn't the whole point of cheese to preserve the curd-y goodness of milk? I mean, that's what cheese is: preserved milk. So, Velveeta was preserved, preserved milk. Why? I'm not quite sure, but I know that Velveeta melts easier (the slut) than regular cheese, which seems to have been very desirable in that age of fondue pots through which the very young and impressionable me once wandered in a daze of well-sugared television.
But, it did not remain this way (the processed cheese, not the sugared TV--that's still the same). Oh, no. Quite possibly because of its similarity to rubber, Velveeta-abuse led to yet another labelling upgrade. Now it was called "Processed Cheese Food". I suppose this was to remind us that Kraft, the manufacturer (and processor) of Velveeta was making food here, not square, orange super-balls. But, since all cheese is food, the redundancy seems preposterous, but, maybe not.... Maybe it's not meant to read "Cheese: food" but "cheese-food".
I know what people-food is and I know what cat-food is, and if these are foods which people and cats, respectively, eat, then, quite obviously, cheese-food is what cheese eats!
So, what we have at this point is processed cheese-food, or the result of processing the food which cheese eats.
Okaaaay....
But to make matters even more complicated, another word was recently added to the mix: Product.
Product: (n) thing produced (brought into existence, made) by an action, operation or natural process.
There's a succinct little Anglo-Saxon word for the product of naturally-processing food, be it cheese or cheese-food. It's just four letters long and it starts with S and ends with T and it isn't "spit".
Processed Cheese-Food Product....
This is what they put into that spray can and, to add insult to injury, they call it "Cheez Whiz™".
Now, where I come from "whiz" has a somewhat... urinary connotation, especially among the male-set who are properly equipped to practice it in a way most females are not. Coupled with the rest of the name, this brings to mind the rather horrific vision of some fellow micturating cheddar. Additionally, this activity is usually done with a sort of backstop, a vertical surface like a wall, or urinal, or at least into frozen precipitation. There's just something wrong about the idea of young men writing their names in the snow with Processed Cheese Food Product.
It's just not right, I tell you! There should be no whizzing of cheez, no processing of cheese-food into products of dubious distinction. It's damn-near criminal and certainly disgusting. Away with the processed "product" of cheese-food! Aroint thee, glop! Get thee gone!
Or at least arrive in a can, like whipped cream does, with nitrous oxide. If I'm going to submit myself to the indignity of re-processing the Processed Cheese Food Product, I could at least get a laugh out of it....
posted: March 23, 2003
My husband, being the terribly house-conscious fellow he is (hah!), picks up a package of "All-Purpose Mats" in a grocery store (no, I don't know how a mat is supposed to qualify as a grocery, but I know I don't plan on eating any) and waves them at me.
"See, this is the sort of thing we need on the boat," he says. "They're much stiffer and sturdier than those rugs we have, now."
"Well, that would be because they aren't rugs...."
"Of course they aren't rugs, they're... all-purpose mats. And, look, they're made in Canada of... 100% unknown fibers?"
Yup, that's what the package says. "Made in Canada of 100% Unknown Fibers." No, really. It's true.
I find something disconcerting in that idea. The manufacturer of mats has no idea what they are made out of, but assumes that they are good for all purposes. How can they know that? What if you decide to, say, use them in your car and then discover that, although you don't know what the fiber is, you do know that it disintegrates on contact with gasoline fumes. Whoopsie. Or worse: you put them in the kids' room only to discover that they dissolve into a vile black goo when in the toddler spills apple juice on them which quickly gains sentience and begins eating the neighbors (though, would that be all bad?) They could be made of the sort of thing some of us were toking in College (except for former President Clinton, who never inhaled, be it maryjane or mats--which made me wonder how it was he could talk so much.)
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of the Unknown Fiber? This is Textila Incongnita, here. Fibrus Occultus. It could be anything! It could be fuzzy cocaine, or shredded cane toad skins or spun baby whale fur (save the unborn baby gay whales for Jesus!) It could be terrorist fibers of pure chemical nastiness just waiting for the moment when they will mix with the right catalyst and bloom forth in choking clouds of vile, green death!
Aggghhh! I've stumbled on a terrorist plot! Notify Homeland Security! Situation Puce! It all makes sense! Of course they were "Made in Canada". What a clever ruse: claiming they are the product of our mild-mannered neighbors to the north! We would never guess that the evil fibers arrived disguised as clothing and carpets, made their way into the hands of the conspirators, who quickly transformed them into all-purpose mats, then packaged them for sale in the United States--for who would be suspicious of humble all-purpose mats? No one! No one, I tell you!
It's a terrorist plot! Stop the all-purpose mats before they kill us all! Hunt them, find them, irradicate them! Give them no quarter! Take no prisoners! Our purposed-mat way of life is at stake! "All-purpose", my butt! They have but one purpose: Evil!
Destruction to the Evil-purpose Mats! They must be stopped before their unknown fibers do their dirty work, before we are inundated with the unknown, the unfamiliar, the (gasp!) foreign!
We must fight them! Fight the Unknown Fiber and the All-Purpose mat wherever they may hide! We must fight them on the beaches! We must fight them in the streets and in our homes! We must--we must....
Wait a minute... Jim says they're two for $12.98.
Fuck Homeland Security, I'm buyin' 'em. I mean, really, how often do you get to buy a genuine piece of the Great Unknown for thirteen bucks?
Live dangerously: it's the last frontier. (Buy mats!)
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