(Charcuterie? Or saltines?)
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Let’s talk a bit about a favorite hobby of mine: eating. (Quick timesaving tip: If eating is not something you do, you’re dead, so stop reading this and go haunt something.)

Food, and mankind’s generally non-fatal preparation of it, has always fascinated me. How our post-Darwin post-knuckle-walking knuckleheads figured out what to eat, and how to prepare it without killing their cave-mates makes for good history. It’s amazing that our hunting and gathering didn’t mistakenly cull the Thanksgiving table’s family herd a lot more than it did.

Take mushrooms, for a quick example. Who, do you suppose, first thought to shove rubbery umbrella-shaped forest molds in their mouth, and then add them to overpriced French entrées? And how many “oops … not that one, Sheila” obituaries do you suppose history has forgotten?

Here are a few fungi-based conversation candidates, based on the different types of mushroom (tasty, deadly, mind-altering):

• Husband to beloved wife: “Here, taste this.”
• Ex-husband to ex-beloved-wife’s lawyer: “Here, taste this.”
• Jerry Garcia: “Hey, back off.”

Next up, oysters. What peckish beachcomber first thought, “You know, if I just pried open some of these sharp underwater rocks, I could open a fish camp restaurant.”

And then there’s bread… one of the staples of mankind’s sustenance, like rice, or Seinfeld. How did we as a species learn to bake bread without going the way of dodos? Recipes for making and baking bread can be staggeringly different. Some want yeast, some don’t, some want some, but not quite yet. Some recipes call for kneading, pausing and then kneading again, baking, pausing and then baking again, kneading, then pausing to “let it rise,” and then giving up and driving to Panera.

There’s one popular food that might not be nearly as well-liked were it not for a bit of good marketing. I know that, as a child, I would never have eagerly looked forward to a winter day’s hot lunch of tomato soup and a nice grilled fermented curd sandwich. People might find it hard to get excited about a bacon-double-fermented-curd-burger with fries. And without that nudge from marketing, we definitely wouldn’t have the tasty snack cracker, FermentedCurd-Its.

According to one online source, humans have created over a thousand types of cheese. France and Italy alone each claim to produce approximately four hundred different cheeses, the main difference being that French cheese usually surrenders, while Italian cheese might lob a horse head at you (especially if the Italian cheese is a family-condoned “made” cheese).

Meanwhile, the British Cheese Board (yes, there is one; no, pun not intended) claims a palate-pleasing palette of seven hundred different cheeses. Everybody everywhere, of course, knows cheddar, but there are many others, including Red Leicester, Whitehaven, Blue Stilton, and two deliciously-named semi-soft cheeses, Stinking Bishop and Renegade Monk.

Courtier: “Your highness, some more Stinking Bishop?”
Queen: “No, I’m in more of a Monk mood.”
Courtier: “Good idea, my liege.”
Queen: “Of course it’s a good idea. I’m Queen.”

According to the internet, cheese was invented in China, or Poland, or Wisconsin, which helps explain why the internet is still free. According to Wikipedia, cheese is valued for its portability, which helps explain why subways smell like they do. Cheese also provides protein, calcium, and phosphorus, not to mention its value in alerting pranksters. (“Cheese it, you guys! The cops!”)

Swiss cheese, with an intentionally neutral taste, is famous for its holes, known in the trade as “eyes.” Swiss cheese without holes does exist, and is referred to as “blind.” Not to be outdone, Belgium is developing a deaf Brie.

From Spain comes Manchego, a pleasant, hard cheese that, based on the price at my grocery, costs more than some film budgets. But the title of World’s Most Expensive Cheese is currently held by a Siberian concoction knows as Pule, pronounced “pyool.” Coming in at some $600 per pound, this uber-curd can only be produced from the milk of a Balkan donkey, and the donkey does not like to be milked. Pule is so expensive that even if it’s your only purchase at the grocery, they won’t let you use the Ten Items Or Less lane.

Norway offers a tasty, mild, cow’s-milk fromage named “Jarlsberg.” (fromage is a French term, roughly translated as Please go away; I’m eating fermented curd.). In fact, it was a friend’s delicious recipe for a Norwegian Jarlsberg cracker dip that led me to this “research” into food. The recipe called for three cups of Norway’s stuff, which I think is the same as twenty-four ounces, but don’t quote me, because the night before my math final in college, I was at a Bonnie Raitt concert. (True, Bonnie and her band were outstanding at counting to three, and four, and six, but I quickly dispensed with all those other numeric distractions, like nine, and fractions. To this day, I can’t distinguish between a square root and a malformed carrot.)

Honorable mention in the weird cheeses parade goes to goat cheese, which is made either from or by goats, hoop cheese, constructed from discarded antebellum skirts, and head cheese, which is not actually cheese at all … but it is head. Usually a cow’s, or a pig’s.

Given that Balkan donkey’s spirited pushback just when being milked, I think it’s fair to assume that we won’t soon see any Pule head cheese in the grocery’s cheese kiosk.

I hope.