CORRESPONDENCE

Taranaki Daily News, 7 February 1930, Page 15

CORRESPONDENCE

"M. 0.5. AND CHEESE PSYCHOLOGY (To the Editor.) Sir—“M.O.Sin “Current Comment” of your last voluminous Saturday’s supplement, in quite good form, connects me with the last quarterly meeting of our Taranaki Chamber of Commerce in dealing with the programme of the recent Teachers’ Summer School. It is quite true that our Chamber of Commerce has shown, and still shows, considerable interest in agriculture, and the instructive and scientific aspects of that “culture,” fully, visualising that as our national prosperity rests upon agriculture as a basic foundation, so agriculture itself is dependent now and will be in the future upon an efficient combination of scientific knowledge, added to mechanical practice, the old free and easy haphazard halcyon days having gone forever. Now for the spirit of pleasantry (spiced with a. vein of persiflage) with which “M. 0.5. connects this “cheeseculture” and the summer school, experts and professors; “curiously” omitting the State school specialist, Inspector McKenzie, who might have expatiated along psychological lines upon oheesc culture and the “educable capacity” of the public with regard to a proper appreciation of the results thereof! Cheese, sir, though mostly round, has many sides to it, not touched upon by “M. 0.5. Take for instance the classic, epic, tragic and comiCj all found to be intimately associated with this commodity; classic, since it is classed as one of the highest and choicest products by which we New Zealanders derive our national status and income; epic, insofar as the great potent contestants still, wage, war in. the present “Battle of the Breeds’’; tragic, very tragic indeed, to us in the calamitous possibility •(now trembling in the balance) of failure .to adequately secure British .custom and patronage; ■ comic .in various anecdotic relations. Take for instance the story -of, the devoted and amorous -lover,- who - wished to ingratiate himself before company with his fair fiancee, highly desirable yet possessing a gentle sense of sarcasm. The supper cheese was highly matured and unusually “mitey.” The lover, fully appreciating the moving parasitic condition, indulged a voracious appetite, and realising his destructive depredations amidst the animated mites, exclaimed truculently (catching a pause in conversation 'T am like the -Scriptural hero. I have slain my thousands and tens of thousands.” “Yes,” assented the failone, “and with, the same weapon—the jawbone of an ass!” ’ “M.O.S” seems to have been rather premature in “cheesing it.” Surely it is not enough that “cheese is cheese,” with Cheddar, Stilton and Gloucester as the “Homey” products, and in the foreign category plain Dutch, Swiss gruyere, Camembert, Roquefort, Limburg and Gorgonzola as others, each having some special qualifications, ranging from the mild and almost flavourless and odourless, to the piquant flavour and the “hummingly” pungent. Then come many shades of colour beyond “M.O.S.’s” yellow, and even the colourless, so that there is much not touched upon by his poetry and philosophy. Think also of the value of our cheese when toasted as a lure for rats, mice and other vermip. No better bait for traps! Dreading to trespass further upon your indulgence, I must limit my elaborations, ending in accord with the harmless levity of “M. 0.5. and now “remark briefly,” but earnestly, “Cheese it!” —I am, etc., BENONI WHITE.