When I first came to live in the United States I felt, like many an immigrant, confused and adrift. Food was not actually the most troubling thing, but it did sometimes make me feel very alien. What was I suppose to understand by the term
“everything bagel”? It sounded very
cosmic but was inevitably an disappointment. But it wasn’t nearly as disappointing as “American cheese." It seemed comprehensible that any country
would lend its name to such a hideous, chemical construction.
Well, to cut a long story short, the Simpsons played an enormous part
in my assimilation, teaching me a vast amount about America and American ways. The fact that the show was written by a
bunch of Yale-educated weirdoes probably helped. And of course I cherished the classic scene
of Homer Simpson staying up all night eating 64 slices of American cheese, which
suggested that some people out there found American cheese as absurd and
hilarious as I did.
And now I read about another immigrant, Gary Shteyngart, an author whose novels include The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan. That’s him below doing some all-American
eating.
He’s just written a memoir titled Little
Failure. Shteyngart was
born in Leningrad in 1972 and moved to the US seven years later. He decided to become a writer aged four or
five. He did it at least partly to
please his grandmother, who “paid” him in food.
For each page he wrote she gave a slice of (wait for it) Soviet cheese. I’m guessing it
looked something like this:
I don't know whether American cheese would have come as a shock to him or not. However, while searching for images of Soviet cheese (yep, it’s a full life), I
did find the image below. This looks
like cheese spread rather than cheese you could slice, and mete out on a page
by page basis, but I’d buy it just for the graphics.
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