I love cheese, yes I do.

Why is cheese as good as sex? Its melts, its tasty, and its sometimes bad for you. My favorites are Manchego, Vermont white cheddar, and Osceola Nippy Cheddar (Aged One Year) from the Osceola Cheese Company in Osceola, Missouri.

Why is Manchego so great? Because it has an al dente bite and a rich creamy flavor, kind of a combination between good Parmesan and white cheddar. It is made from sheep’s milk and I can eat $5-worth in one sitting.

Vermont white cheddar is so great on hamburgers using anything else is a travesty. White cheddar should be mandatory eating to earn a college degree. Put it with a sexy barbecue sauce on a turkey burger with mushrooms, zucchini, a little real mayonnaise, and a good sesame seed bun and see if you can stop the orgasms.

In order to be a good journalist (which I work ever so hard to be) and present both sides of the story, I have to mention the treacherously heinous cheeses I have encountered over the years. Let’s start with the obvious. Limburger almost destroyed my entire taste bud system. I had heard the stories, but, since I have never been one to follow trends or conventional tastes, I thought I’d give it a shot. The smell, which was exactly the same smell as a goat’s head, a skunk’s ass, a hive of stink bugs, and the leftovers in John Wayne Gacy’s basement rotting together in closed barrel for three weeks in mid-summer Florida, should have warned me that I was getting in over my head.

But I did it anyway. Full-on, I scooped some onto a spoon and pushed it down. Barf began welling up in my throat as the ass cheese forced its way down. The two inter-mingled, creating a violent reaction that sent me spewing into the kitchen sink. A fetid cottage cheese of puke and Limburger seared scars on the drain lip like someone who continually smoked the wrong end of the cigarette. It possessed the apartment, so I moved.

Raclette was a damnable disappointment, also. One of the many books I own on cheese had a picture in it of a southern Frenchman scraping Raclette off a giant nutty-yellow wheel with a hot knife and smothering a boiled potato-ette with it, ready to pop into his waiting mouth. The picture was so enticing I went out and bought some Raclette as soon as I could. I penetrated the protective plastic and my nostrils were immediately accosted by a curling stench that wound its way into my sinuses and shot evil hallucinations of hot public bathroom stalls and pickled road kill straight into my brain. Like the Limburger, I tasted it, the horrifying slice of French stench cells lining my sinuses with rapacious fecundity. My snot will never be the same.

So, after all the horror, I must get to my favorite cheese of all, Osceola Nippy Cheddar (Aged One Year). Anyone who has driven from Lake Pomme de Terre to Kansas City knows about the Osceola Cheese Company. It’s an oasis in the middle of a fairly lengthy drive that welcomes the traveler with free samples of most of their wares. The Nippy Cheddar (aged one year) is a perfect balance of that cheddar whang, perfect creamy consistency, and superb melt-ability rarely matched. Eating nippy cheddar (aged one year) erases all past cheese fiascos, a bad childhood, and continually renews my faith in mankind and cheese.