Grilled cheese is delicious

I ate a grilled cheese on my deck last night and it occurred to me -- where have our taste buds gone? I'm living in a country where most kids would love to have a grilled cheese -- so long as its American cheese on white bread. American cheese, of course, really has no taste except of a sort of scented rubber and plastic. White bread also has no taste, no smell, what is it but a filler? Most of these same kids would find what I was eating disgusting. My grilled cheese consisted of two raw milk cheeses: a blue and an asiago-style, locally baked whole grain bread, French dijon mustard and pure fruit plum preserves (and since I rarely have butter I pan fried it in olive oil which worked just as well). It was out of this world.

If you presented Wonder Bread or a Kraft single to anyone who appreciated food (which would include most Europeans for instance), they would taste them and look at you like you must be joking. So where did this come from? Are kids born not liking wheat bread? Do they develop a liking of rubber and plastic with a faint cheese scent as they start kindergarden? What bothers me is not as much this idea that our kids have no sense of taste or quality -- preferring a fake manufactured product over one that has been cultivated for centuries and often made by hand with care and attention. No, what bothers me is that this is engrained in us for the rest of our lives. Kids may never grow up to appreciate bread that tastes like bread or cheese that tastes like cheese. This isn't anything new. We were once these kids. One of the biggest problems with our eating is that we have no appreciation for quality -- no care for the difference between processed and real. And little concern for the difference between something that tastes faintly like a hamburger -- such as McDonalds -- and a true hamburger like the grass fed beef one sold at Big Jones (sure it's $14 but you'll make it back on reduced medical bills later).

And forgetting that many people might think it's odd to put preserves and mustard on a grilled cheese (again, it was amazing), I can't imagine most American kids (Americans?) would like either under any circumstances. The dijon mustard was a pure, authentic variety from France. It tasted much stronger than the bland yellow mustard we are more accostomed to. The perserves were not as sweet as the jelly we tend to buy in the grocery store (there was no sugar added) and it certainly wasn't as smooth -- there were large chuncks of plumbs.

There are other benefits to quality as well. Some writers argue that where we eat quality food full of flavor (and much more full of nutrients), we feel the need to eat less of it. Part of this may also be because we eat it slower and savor it -- appreciating each bite and hoping it won't end rather than just stuffing it in our facehole. You also couldn't eat my grilled cheese in the car or on the run as it would be dripping all over the place. Cheese drips -- that's what it does. American cheese doesn't because it's not cheese. Oh and there would be bread crumbs all over the place from the crust. Ever wonder why these problems don't occur with processed foods? They were engineered, in part, to eat on the run (often in the car).

I fear I am rambing so let me bring this back. What I wonder about is how we got here. How did this country full of immigrants from places that truly appreciate food find themselves in a country that has no appreciation for quality? I hope we can someday reconnect to some appreciation of food because the benefits could be great. We'd eat less, pay more for our food (enriching farmers and producers of quality over quantity), spend our money at shops more than mega stores (no more buying your food at Costco), and the food we would consumer, of course, would be much better for you -- food the way nature intended. After all, how often does a processed imitation truly taste better than the real thing? And the next time someone offers you something with American cheese you'd sit back and take offense to how our country's eponymous cheese became a fake rubber imposter. Grilled cheese? That's not cheese.