Toward a Theory of Cheese Haters
Cheese. I’m always writing about cheese. Cheese pizza. Goat cheese. Cheese toast. And today is another “putting cheese on food” day. It’s a very popular food item here in the states, one might even call it an all American staple. I’m talking about the one and only cheeseburger.
Today is National Cheeseburger Day.
I used to get kid’s meals as a child. In an ideal world, we all did. In such a world, we’d all get the toy packaged along with our burger and fries. We’d all be rewarded for stuffing our mouth with fatty, grease infused deliciousness. But I’ll take it one step further: in this ideal world we’d all get a cheeseburger in our kid’s meal, not just a plain old hamburger.
The stats are on my side: according to The Daily Meal, 74% of people prefer at least one slice of cheese on their burger. And by the lights of this random, deleted Redditor in this thread, “You're insane if you don't prefer cheese.” So what’s up with the 26% that don’t prefer the perfection of cheese on their burger?
One obvious issue is that some people are unadulterated cheese haters. Pure and simple. According to this study, 6% of 332 people were in fact disgusted by cheese. It’s not that they just didn’t appreciate the delicacy. No, no. To them, cheese is as enjoyable as a port-a-potty in the summer.
There are two main reasons for their stomach turning revulsion. For nearly a fifth of the study’s participants, their aversion derives from a common negative experience with the dairy world: lactose intolerance. As someone weirdly intolerant of milk and ice cream myself but not cheese, I can dig it. No one appreciates the stomach gurgling chaos of lactose intolerance.
The other reason has much less to do with biology and a lot more to do with how one was raised. See, cheese isn’t naturally appealing. After all, the process of creating cheese starts off with curdling milk and a fragrance of decay—and that smell of decay never entirely goes away. So, as the study concludes, cheese lovers overcame the natural revulsion of cheese by good old human conditioning. People see, people do, and before you know it we’re all eating stinky cheese.
But cheese haters simply never learned to love cheese. They missed that gustatory lesson when growing up and therefore never outgrew the natural disgust of cheese’s aroma.
But cheese, I certainly was taught to love it. Even on those rare occasions when my stomach doesn’t love it, I still do. And I always will.
Happy National Cheeseburger Day!