How Much Cheese - Life and Times in the Age of Consumerism

When my wife and I returned from Egypt, we had a bit of culture shock.  We had just come from a country where there were three types of cheese – one was the type of cheese that tourists paid exorbitant sums for, another was the type of cheese that foreigners who lived in Egypt paid realistic prices for, and the last was the type of cheese that Egyptians paid Egyptian prices for.  All were soft and white and tasted exactly the same.  We had walked into a supermarket upon returning to the States and almost had a heart attack at the amount of food choices available to us.  I went down the cheese aisle and suffered a mild anxiety attack.  This was a whole aisle of cheese! Block cheese, shredded cheese, sliced cheese, with pimientos, or jalapenos, yellow, white, sharp, medium, mild, aged, crumbled…I was there to buy cheese but I couldn’t wrap my head around how much fucking cheese there was and had a mini breakdown.

So I did the only thing I could – I hightailed it out of the store, stopping only when I reached my car to light a cigarette and calm my nerves.

“Good lord,” I said to my wife, who was looking as ashen and panic stricken as me, “how much cheese does one man truly need?”