Remember all those delicious Italian cheeses? Mmm. So do I.
This, however, is not one of them. This is a block of … something which looks like cheese, and which I bought to wrap the dogs’ pills so that they’d just eat them. It certainly moulds around capsules and pills very nicely, and they certainly eat it with every appearance of pleasure, so as far as that goes, it works quite well.
However, OH pointed something out to me. Something weird, and perhaps very important, and which I’d missed altogether.
Nowhere on the label is this product actually described as ‘cheese’.
It surely looks like cheese; it says ‘Double Gloucester’ on the front (which is definitely a well-known variety of English cheese), it’s more or less the right colour, and the nutritional values are all in line with what you’d expect from a pack of cheese. But it does not claim that this actually is cheese.
Of course, OH says ‘quite right, too’. He would give it as his opinion that of course it isn’t cheese. It might look yellow and have a waxy, slightly greasy feel – as cheese does – but you should not be able to make models with a good cheese, as he is certain you could with this. It also has very little cheese odour, and though we haven’t actually been able to bring ourselves to taste it, we suspect that it won’t have much cheese flavour, either.
So. Perhaps it isn’t, after all, cheese. Perhaps it is simply some kind of artificially-coagulated milk product which doesn’t merit the appellation of ‘cheese’ under current EU regulations!
To paraphrase a common saying: it might look like cheese, slice like cheese, and smell vaguely like cheese, but that doesn’t necessary mean it is cheese.















