The Great Grilled Cheese Debate

This is important stuff. I fear I started a firestorm last week when I told tale of my Grilled Cheese debacle. Ok, maybe "firestorm" is overstating it a little, but when you're telling the story in the line to the cafeteria and someone two spaces in front of you turns around and and says "you use cheez whiz in grilled cheese?!!", in that same sort of "you wouldn't let a Coors Light Girl pin a Coors button on you because you don't like the beer??!!" type of tone - well, at that point you pretty much know that this is a subject about which people feel pretty strongly.

So I've done some research. BTW, in the process of my research I found a very cool (it makes really neat graphs and has cool scientific looking tables) website on nutritional data -you just type the food item you're looking for and you get a very detailed analytical break-out of the nutritional content.

First off - Kraft Cheez Whiz is 15% carbs, 68% fats and 17% protein; it's a good source of Calcium, and a very good source of Phosphorus (although someone's going to have to tell me why I want to be eating phosphorous... other than perhaps being better able to find the loo on a dark night). On the bad side, it is very high in Saturated Fat and Sodium. It also has 79.2 mg of potassium, 0.5 mg of zinc and 1.9 mg of ash... again, I'm not sure I want to know why I'm eating ash. Oh, in case you were wondering, there's no alcohol in it.

Now, let's have a look at processed cheese slices. Pasteurized process cheese is made from one or more cheeses, such as cheddar or colby, and may have cream or anhydrous milkfat added. The cheese is blended and heated with an emulsifier—typically a sodium or potassium phosphate, tartrate, or citrate—and other optional ingredients such as water, salt, artificial color, and spices or other flavorings. The cheese is then poured into molds to solidify and is later packaged. Now doesn't that sound yummy??!!

The average american processed cheese slice has 8% carbs, 66% fat and 17% protein. It pretty much scores the same on calcium, saturated fats and sodium - and yes, you also get the phosphorous thing happening. Now, the processed cheese slice has a slightly lower cholesteral count than Cheez Whiz (18 mg vs 24 mg,) and marginally lower water content, plus you get a touch more zinc, and you get the added benefit (Ithink) of having some selenium thrown in. You also get more vitamins - like 2.0 mcg's of Folates (although they actually classify them as "dietary folate equivalents", which sounds awfully like what they try to pass off at theatres as butter - I think they call it golden topping).

I guess all of this to net out - if you're going to have a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner you're not making it because it's a nutritional supplement for all the junk you've eaten during the day - you're eating it because it's convenient.

And that brings us back to the crux of this debate. I challenge anyway to do a blind taste test on Cheese slice vs Cheez Whiz. I fully understand that a large part of how people react to taste is the result of texture, but I'm not sure I can be convinced that a melted process cheese slice is an awful lot different than processed cheese spread.

So we're back to convenience... and to me, opening a jar and spreading cheese is more convenient than opening a plastic wrapper, peeling off more individual plastic wrapping, and then slapping on a piece of processed cheese - I won't even raise the environmental argument since I'm not sure I'm on totally defensible grounds. But I fully expect that others will see the reverse.

So my final point on this comes down to demographics. I have an eerie feeling that this argument will be swayed by a person's generation. My bold statment (for which I expect to be mirthlessly abused) is that the younger generation (which we'll classify as 32 or younger) have grown up on processed cheese slices - and that will determine the outcome of this debate.

So bring it on. Take my poll and let's see where this ends up!!