Feta Cheese. How can
something taste so good and smell so gross?
I have some feta cheese open in my kitchen, and I'm eating it by the
chunk (if you can call the crumbly blobs of it chunks) while I run around doing
chores. Suddenly I head back into the kitchen
and realize it smells like dirty gym socks.
Feta Cheese. I just don't
understand it. How can the nose and
taste buds have such a serious disconnect over this?
I suppose it's a lot like coffee. Coffee smells good; coffee smells great;
coffee smells fantastic. But coffee
tastes horrible; coffee tastes hideous; coffee tastes like dirty gym socks
would if one were to be stuffed into your mouth. When I worked at Dunkin Donuts (not nearly as
glamorous as the ads make it seem, believe me), I tried coffee every way one
could possibly take it: black, with sugar, with cream, with cream and sugar,
half and half (that's half coffee half milk), and then there is the infamous
black light half and half max, which isn't some weird sixties light trick but
rather half high-test, half decaf, half cream, with extra sugar. Okay, I just made up that name, but I used to
have a regular patron at DD who ordered his coffee that way. Seriously - why bother with the coffee, man? Just tear open a can of condensed milk and be
done with it.
Feta cheese, though, I'll bet would be good on just about
anything: Rice Krispies and feta with
milk, peanut butter and jelly with feta, spaghetti and meatballs with feta
(which actually sounds really, really good and is probably already a staple in
more progressive homes than mine), onion rings and feta (yup, another one to
try), and maybe even feta frozen yogurt.
I know feta cheese looks a lot like colicky baby vomit and
smells like it, too, but feta cheese is delicious. It's just one of those foods that no one
would try unless forcefully coerced.
Like pig's feet and tripe and brains and liver and Shit on a
Shingle. (Okay, I will admit to having a
bit of an affinity for SOS growing up when my WWII-vet dad would wax poetic
about mess hall food and force us all to eat it like it was Delmonico steak.)
Hmmmm, maybe, just maybe, if I put feta in the coffee, I
might like coffee. Feta may well be the
key to the universe as we know it. Explains why the Athenians were great thinkers
and the Spartans were great fighters. Then again, it may be the most effective
weapon we have next to mustard gas, so maybe the Greeks didn't actually hide
inside that Trojan horse after all.
Maybe they shoved it full of feta cheese, and the Trojans were forced to
open the gates because of the stench.
Maybe they were actually Fetanians and Homer got it all
wrong in the Iliad. He was probably drinking coffee when he wrote
it.
