It’s The Cheese – The Out Of My Mind Blog

According to an article at Smithsonianmag.com, America may be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but the welcome mat is definitely not out for our excess cheese. All 1.19 billion pounds of it (not a typo).

America’s cheese vats are pushed to overflowing, and we’re not only running out of space, we’re running out of options.

Suggestions such as shipping our surplus cheese to Switzerland and storing it in the holes of their surplus cheese were dismissed out of hand. Apparently, that runs afoul of several diplomatic treaties.

Nor can we turn to mathematics for a solution. For example, if every person in America ate one more cheeseburger a week, our cheese problem would be solved. Unfortunately, increased burger consumption would leave us with an excess of dead cow carcasses.

Needless to say, the Swiss were not crazy about taking those in, either.

As with all great problems, though, the solution has been staring us in the face—providing you didn’t sleep through high-school economics. People will stop making cheese as soon as people stop asking for it. And, that means only one thing.

We have to change the name of cheese.

If we’ve learned anything from the great creativity of great American corporations, it’s that, when faced with an insurmountable problem, change its name.

Are you an accounting company caught in a scandal for being too cozy with a client? Change your name from Burpee, Bunkie, Fitzgerald and Smith to any combination of random letters not already being used by a prescription medicine.

Are you an organization faced with reduced profits if you give raises to your janitors?

And, now, here comes the Tribune Company. Embroiled in a takeover battle with Gannett (the publisher of USA Today), Tribune has, for obvious reasons, changed its name to tronc (with a small t). What red-blooded corporate Gannett executive is going to admit to buying a tronc?

This is why I propose we change the name of cheese to fluccous (pronounced just the way you imagine it).

The new name is derived from two important cheese-making ingredients: ccous comes from streptococcus bacteria, the bacteria that lands you in the emergency room; and, flu comes from the brine-soaked intestines of baby calves, the thought of which should make you sick.

Don’t be fooled by its simplicity. It’s a change I predict will be highly effective.

(The caring mother can substitute tomato soup and grilled fluccous or baked potato with Fluccous Whiz according to her family’s taste.)

As for all that left-over cheese people won’t be eating. Once again we turn to the creativity of American corporations and ship our un-sellable cheese to third-world countries where it can proudly sit on store shelves, right next to our other un-sellable products.

Like saccharin.

Only overseas, we name our cheese Viagra.