Revisiting an old food foe
Chesdale cheese slices were one of the banes of Charlotte Muru-Lanning’s childhood. Can she learn to love them as an adult?
This is an excerpt from our weekly food newsletter, The Boil Up.
For most of my childhood, Chesdale cheese slices were a mainstay in the fridge. Much to my disappointment. And they – alongside luncheon sausage and jam – became part of an internalised trio of lunchbox foods that kids were meant to like but that I, unfortunately, didn’t. It wasn’t even joyfully plastic in a vibrant orange American cheese kind of way. Instead, it was a pale, silken flop of a substance that seemed to only ever play the worst notes of tangy.
But yesterday, as I drove myself to an interview for the first time since passing my driver’s license, I found my mind drifting to the individually wrapped “cheese” slices. Perhaps it was the loose parallels between the cheese and industrialised car convenience as I sat in traffic while an air-conditioned train rattled past. Or it was one of the persistent nostalgic cravings that we all seem to be infected by lately. Maybe I was just hungry because I’d skipped lunch.
I wondered if Chesdale might be one of those foods that have an unjustly negative reputation among food snobs. Perhaps it could be the next happening cheese trend? I secured a packet, took them back to the car and ate a slice.
I want to say that it was some kind of profoundly romantic food moment where I realised this cheese was actually worth us all revisiting. But peeling back the plastic revealed something exactly as bad as I remembered.
It’s deeply unpopular to come to a negative conclusion on a mainstream food item, and the taste value of all food is of course subjective, but I couldn’t help but wonder, with the wide range of cheeses available these days, why is there still a market for this stuff?
I’ve not encountered a packet in our family fridge for at least a decade but a good place to start I thought, would be once loyal…
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