G. K. Chesterton on the subject of Cheese:

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet that I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of [a] nursery rhyme...[e]xcept Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese.

Yet it has every quality which we require in an exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to breeze and seas (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say Cheese it! or even Quite the cheese.

I reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded...to a large and elaborate restaurant, where I knew I could get a great many things besides bread and cheese. I could get that also, however; or at least I expected to get it; but I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon, and left England behind.

The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits.

Biscuits - to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits - to one who had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread!

I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates.

Amen!

And thanks to my friend Pieter, for bringing Chesterton and Cheese to my attention a few years back!