Mashable's new series Don't @ Me takes unpopular opinions and backs them up with...reasons. We all have our ways, but we may just convince you to change yours. And if not, chill.
Some food rules are necessary — it's best for everyone if I don't eat tomato soup with a fork, for instance — but some are less "helpful guideline" and more "low-grade tyranny." Among the worst of these is the unspoken law of string cheese consumption: If you bite into the string cheese, you're not just eating it wrong. You're also a monster.
The truth is that biting into a stick of string cheese is fine. In fact, it's often the best way to eat a cheese stick, a snack that people weirdly expect to be "fun" even though its real value lies in its practicality. String cheeses are individually packaged, ready to eat at a moment's notice. If you won't be away from a fridge for too long, it even makes sense to carry one around in case you need a quick protein boost. String cheese appears on dozens of lists of easy, portable snacks.
So tell me why it makes sense to eat your easy, portable snack in the least convenient way possible?
To eat a string cheese the "right" way requires time, your full attention, and two impeccably clean hands — basically an impossible scenario if you're busy at all.
First you must remove the cheese from its peel-down wrapper, which is already a mistake: The peel-down wrapper is clearly designed to function like a banana peel, letting you eat the cheese at your own pace without having to hold it in your sweaty hand. You gotta take the whole thing out, though, so you can then dig your fingernails into the cheese and peel off whatever processed dairy fiber happens to come loose. Cheese gets under your nails. You can't do anything else with your hands, which are now vaguely waxy. The cheese gets damper by the second. A nightmare!
It didn't have to be this way, though, not if you ate this cheese like you would any other cheese. You could have simply peeled the wrapper back a little, then taken a nice, normal-sized bite of the cheese. You wouldn't have gotten cheese all over your hands, or embedded under your nails. You could have rested the partially-wrapped cheese on your desk if you wanted to take a break. There would have been no pressure to peel faster, no unnecessary cheese-hand cross pollination. Most importantly, you'd have gotten a real bite of cheese, not a stringy excuse for one.
But you'll enjoy none of those benefits if you play by conventional string cheese rules. You can't just eat a snack; you have to make it a whole game for some reason.
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This is basically the root of the issue. We are applying adult-caliber rules to a snack designed for small children.
While string cheese didn't originate as a food for kids, it became a lunchbox favorite when Baker Cheese, the company that popularized the snack, started to sell it in individually packaged units. This makes sense: Getting kids to eat healthy foods can be difficult, and string cheese is a game (peeling!) as well as a snack.
But adults don't need to play games while they eat snacks. If they want to, that's great — lord knows I love to sort a bag of Skittles. Treating a peel-able cheese stick like any other cheese stick, however, is not a crime. Sometimes you just need to eat a hunk of cheese as fast as possible. One of adulthood's sweetest culinary privileges is doing that with any cheese at all.
