Photo by Janelle Jones
Most things in life are fake. True fact that I just made up. Driving through the suburbs, you see an emerald green lawn sprawling in the front yard of some prefab mansion; when you get closer to feel the fresh grass under your bare feet, you realize it's actually a carpet of astroturf.Humans are the worst: women enlarge breasts, dye hair, pluck and pull, contorting themselves to look like someone else, become someone else. Men get ab implants and calf-enhancement surgeries, shave certain patches of hair, and glue on others in different locations. We are creators of deceit. It's in our genetic code. We pump beef with toxic gases so it looks pinker and fresher. We shave down rotten carrots and dip them in bleach and call them baby carrots so they're little and seem tasty. We are liars, and the worst part is that some of these lies become the norm, the accepted, the expected.Do you ever wonder why cheese is orange? Well, it's not. That's dye. Natural cheese colors ranges from alabaster white—a great goat gouda or fresh chèvre, for example—to muddled tan, deep ochre, sometimes with shocks of blue inside a marbled beige. But not orange. So how did this fictitious, wholly unnatural color come to represent a good slab of dairy? Great question, simple answer: deception.Good, quality cheese (to be defined as cheese made using milk from animals who actually get to graze on pasture, experience seasons, participate in their natural cycles of life and love and living, as opposed to those poor dairy beasts who are locked up inside a mass milking hall where there is no natural light and mother nature is represented by flickering florescent overhead lighting and no fresh air) has tints of deep yellow and pale orange. Full fat cheese, meaning that which does not have its butterfat or cream skimmed from the milk, sometimes has a faint green tinge from all that fresh grass the happy animals got to feast on before having their udders gently yanked. Real, good-quality milk, from animals eating fresh greens, is not white, and thus because the milk is not white, the cheese is not white. Back in the day, when the industrial farming boom was taking shape, factory dairy makers needed their white, rubbery rubbish to resemble the buttery, gilded slabs the masses had come to know as tasty cheese. So they did what any respectable grifter would do, and added dye to the milk so the cheese would resemble the good shit. This dazzling new cheese took the masses by storm, and not unlike the masses' infatuation with glitz and glamour (how else do you explain the Kardashian phenomenon or People magazine?) folks started thinking, Orange is good, orange is tasty, orange is cheese.So what started as a full-on lie, or, more accurately, a big fat deception, became the norm, the status quo, the depressing reflection that humans like to eat things that are colorful and artificial. So the next time you see that apricot-hued American Single melting atop a gas-infused "beef" patty, just remember: it might taste good, but the whole thing is a goddamn lie.