By Jim Hagarty
2016
There used to be a TV commercial played a lot in our area that promoted milk by calling it “nature’s perfect food.”
It had a good ring to it and I’m sure it was one of the most successful ad campaigns ever. Probably sold a lot of milk.
But our advertising standards council at the time should have stepped in. Because the claim that milk is nature’s perfect food is based on a lie.
I will admit that milk is good but where it belongs on the food totem pole is next to the actual perfect food generated by nature which is, of course, the grilled cheese sandwich. I am shocked that there has never been a museum or an interpretive centre or a hall of fame constructed and promoted for the humble grilled cheese sandwich and the person who created the first grilled cheese, a man or woman who should be up there with the exalted Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.
Without the grilled cheese sandwich, the world would be populated with about one third of the bachelors that inhabit it, the other two-thirds inevitably having died out from starvation and been forgotten about. Young children, similarly, would suffer when left in the company of their hapless fathers if the “gilled cheez sammich” had never been invented. Their sole source of nourishment would be a bag of cookies.
Yes, I often wonder about the first person who ever did a thing. First to make a pie out of cherries. The first to inject air bubbles into a sugary liquid and call it pop. The person who first said, “Hey, let’s slice that potato real thin and cook it.”
I believe it was the Earl of Sandwich who started the ball rolling for the grilled cheese when he slapped some meat and lettuce between two slices of bread. I don’t know how many hundreds of years might have passed before someone with genius powers thought to throw some cheese between two bread slices and cook the contraption in a pan over an open fire.
I just finished a grilled cheese, in case you’re wondering.
And I’m feeling good.
Had a glass of nature’s less-than-perfect food with it.
