Cheese

Cheese.  Oh, how I love you.  Your stinky aroma, your quasi-rotted taste.  I love you, love you, love you.  Particularly when you come in the form of a ball encrusted with almond slivers.  Preferably on a whole wheat cracker.

Cheese.  Fermented mammary excretions from a cow.  Or a goat.  Except I don’t like goat cheese.  It tastes like goat.  I don’t like the way goat tastes.  I imagine that walking up to a goat and licking it tastes the same.  I haven’t had cheese from any other mammals, come to think of it.  I hear that the milk from a whale is as thick as cottage cheese.  I guess you skip the whole fermenting process with that one.  

Cheese bothers me.  I know I shouldn’t love it, but I do.  I know I shouldn’t eat it, but I do.  I don’t consume it in the mass quantities that I once did, but I still haven’t cut it out completely.  Why should I?  I should because I fundamentally don’t  believe that adult mammals should be consuming milk.  Milk is for babies, not adults.  Do you know why whale milk is so thick and fatty?  Well, when you’re meant to get as big as a whale AND you have to grow really fast to avoid all those unpleasant ocean predators AND you have to tolerate those frigid ocean temperature, you sort of need a high-calorie, high-fat food to kick start the whole process.  It’s not that far a leap from whale’s milk to cow’s milk.  Cow’s milk is meant to do pretty much the same thing: take a baby animal to a pretty big animal in a short period of time.  That’s why there’s all that fat.

Apart from that, there’s the whole issue of how cows are treated in the production of milk.  If we all agree that milk is for babies, then how is it that all these cows are producing milk?  Where are all the babies at?  And why aren’t they with their mommas, drinking their milk?  I don’t know why…I just think about these things.

So, yeah, I sometimes feel weird when I eat cheese.  I don’t drink milk.  I pretty much don’t eat ice cream.  I don’t eat dairy yogurt.  But I eat cheese.  I eat cheese and I love it.

Do I get like this because this is an inconsistency between my actions and my beliefs?  Or do I get like this because I am falling prey to the trappings of a title?  Mainly, the title: VEGAN.  I can’t use that moniker unless I quit the cheese.  But…should I care?  The answer, of course, is “no.”  But, for some reason, I find myself falling victim to the external pressure I feel to fall neatly into a category or to represent my fellow non-carnivores in the best way possible.  It’s odd how you can be sure sure of yourself in some regards but not so confident in others.  This small, seemingly insignificant detail means something to me.  I guess I just need to explore why.

Cheese.