Reason # 9. Cheese is my jam

Sorry vegan friends, I love your cause but cheese is the one reason I could never become a vegan.

I have stopped eating sugar, went months without drinking and even broke up with carbs for a while. I am pretty sure I could do all of those again but not giving up on cheese. Cheese is my jam. It is the one food type I would choose to have as my last meal — unless I am hungover on my last day on earth; in that case, carbs will most probably win the race.

My cheese affair is deeply rooted to me growing up in Colombia. In case you didn’t know, we find any excuse to eat cheese. If you go and google strange things to eat in Colombia, you will most probably find that the number one thing people find the oddest, yet most delicious, is having cheese inside of their hot chocolate while on a trip to beautiful Colombia.

Don’t judge it until you try it. It is one of the best eating rituals, almost like having green tea on a traditional Chinese tea set, or sipping on that really expensive wine only a few people know about and can actually afford, only this, you can afford on a daily basis. The cheese melts inside the hot chocolate while you fish its melted deliciousness with a spoon on one hand while dipping a crafty piece of bread in the hot chocolate with the other.

And if hot chocolate isn’t sweet enough for you, you can have cheese for dessert. All you need to do is pair it arequipe (kind of caramel but better), with guava paste, some jam or with a molasses sauce. If you are more into salty food, rest assured there are just as many, if not more ways to enjoy cheese back home — on your arepas, on cassava, on corn, with coffee, by itself, in a wide number of different and beautiful baked type of breads, inside empanadas; you name it, we probably have it with a slice of cheese on the side.

If in doubt, ask my husband Pierre. I am pretty sure my unconventional way of being has shocked him a few times over the close to 14 years we’ve known each other, but he always remembers fondly the first time my dad came to visit us in New Zealand. He reckons he has never seen someone eat so much cheese. He will tell the story as if my dad had broken a Guinness World Record — he could not comprehend how we could go from having 1kg of cheese a month to consuming two per week. And to this day, he laughs every time I buy mozzarella because he knows he won’t get a chance to have a piece, by the time he feels like having some, the cheese monster living in the house would have demolished it all.

What I love about loving cheese so much is not even the food itself but the beautiful cultural resonance it has on me. A huge part of who we are is what we eat and who we eat it with. A shared meal is a beautiful moment of communion and my love for cheese is in a way, my love for Colombia and all the beautiful things that make us such a rich and diverse culture.

More often than not, it is the simpler things in life that brings us the most joy and why this is another reason why i love myself.

#35reasonswhyilovemyself