Cheez Whiz: A love story

I don’t remember the first time I tasted Cheez Whiz, nor where I was when it happened. What I do know for certain is that it could not have occurred in my Vancouver childhood home where my mother, a hippy-esque Belgian, imposed a strict blockade against anything remotely unnatural or American—from no-stir peanut butter and margarine to fluoridated toothpaste and microwave ovens. Having survived breast cancer in her late 20s, she was determined that her children would not befall a similar fate; by keeping us clear of preservatives, X-rays and mysterious food-zapping beams, we might just give cancer the slip.

While other kids’ parents embraced the convenience of instant mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, and store-bought cookies, my mother’s resolve held fast. Ours was a home of unsweetened carob squares, a dreaded monthly moussaka, and, if we were lucky, the odd chunk of halvah from the local food co-op. 

I have a vivid memory of my mother spending my entire 7th birthday afternoon in a sweat, racing between the stove and blender. She wanted to lend a splash of color to my birthday cake, but refused to taint it with artificial food coloring. She was furiously trying to extract pigments from carrots, beets, and berries. The cake ended up beige. 

Of all the FD&C dyes, she reserved the highest suspicion for blue. “Nothing edible in nature is blue,” she would intone, darkly. “You should never, ever eat anything blue.” 

I do know that my first taste of Cheez Whiz, whenever it did happen, was life changing. Just as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring upended Parisian sensibilities about classical music in 1913, Cheez Whiz disrupted my sense of taste, setting off a riot in my mouth. It wasn’t good for me, or organic, or free-range, or fussed over for hours. It wasn’t complicated or nutritious. It didn’t even resemble food. It tasted like plastic, if plastic were delicious. My mother’s cooking rejected America, but Cheez Whiz embodied its very soul. 

Unguent, with a cloying yet strangely pleasant tang, Cheez Whiz is to cheese as muzak is to Mozart. It’s the auto-tune of the food world: over-engineered, glossy, and perfectly modulated. With a mouthfeel best described as dieselly, it hits the glorious trifecta of salt, fat, and acid, delivering in one tablespoon-sized glop almost ten percent of your daily recommended sodium and five percent of your daily recommended saturated fat. Its first listed ingredient is “modified milk ingredients” followed by “water”—and then, rather unexpectedly, “cheese”. There’s also corn maltodextrin, sodium phosphates, sodium alginate, lactic acid, sorbic acid, colour, and the catch-all “seasoning”. Oh, and ground mustard. 

During the first months of the COVID pandemic, trapped at home trying to juggle work and parental responsibilities for two squirrelly young boys, my normal resolve around serving healthy meals weakened, then collapsed entirely. Emotionally and mentally spent, I no longer had the energy to cook meals from scratch, let alone worry about whether they were nutritionally sound or could embolden a tumour. Convenience and ease reigned supreme. I traded homemade kale chips for Goldfish Crackers, smoothies for popsicles. It wasn’t long before, on a masked and gloved shopping trip, I succumbed to the lure of Cheez Whiz as well. 

Despite its discomfiting hue and texture, Cheez Whiz is sold in glass—not plastic—jars, which feels like a weird flex. Fancy jam comes in glass jars. So do gourmet pasta sauces and imported French yogurts. But there it is, standing proud in the dairy case next to the pre-shredded mozzarella and the Philadelphia cream cheese, unashamed of its laboratory origins. If it could talk, it would sound like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: “I won’t be ig-NORED, Dan!”

It had been decades since I’d last eaten it, as an infrequent indulgence in my 20s, but it was just as I’d remembered it: ludicrous, crass, and irresistible. Together, my kids and I devoured one 900g jar, and then another. I spread it on crackers, jammed it into the spine of romaine lettuce, ate it by the spoonful when no one was looking. At a time when everything had shut down, including us, it was a tiny escape from the shitstorm swirling around us. It tasted like freedom.

In the Before Times, my mother would insist on joining us for a weekly Shabbat dinner, which she would cook in our kitchen. She had actually been raised Catholic and gone to boarding school run by nuns (actual nuns!), and never officially converted to Judaism after marrying my father. Even so, she insisted her children be raised in his faith and, by some magic of osmosis, had morphed into a stereotypical Jewish mother. 

She would enter our home and set to work washing dishes, cleaning floors, emptying the garbage, and ignoring my pleas to stop. Along with organic roast chicken she would deliver what felt like an endless barrage of unrequested groceries: multiple jars of organic canola oil, heads of pesticide-free romaine lettuce, pound upon pound of organic cream cheese. I knew what she was doing: saturating us with her “safe” foods so we couldn’t fend for ourselves and risk consuming something that didn’t meet her seal of approval.

It was a weekly onslaught that felt like an invasion, one I felt powerless to stop. We didn’t really want to do Shabbat. At least not every week. But whenever I asked for a break, or some space, my mother would wield her mastery of both Jewish and Catholic guilt, and I’d inevitably end up feeling like shit. Because what kind of a privileged asshole complains about being provided home-cooked meals, a tidy kitchen, and free organic groceries? 

The whole situation was ridiculous, and tense, and stupid. There seemed no way out—until COVID-19 forced my mother from our kitchen to our doorstep. She’d still drop off boxloads of food, but was prevented from peering into our fridge or cupboards with a disapproving eye. Cheez Whiz could stay the night, like a bad boyfriend, and Mom would never know.    

Brought to market by Kraft Foods in the early 1950s, this Frankensteinian concoction was developed by a team led by food scientist Edwin Traisman. I like to imagine Traisman with tousled hair, bushy eyebrows, and wild eyes, madly working away through the night. I picture him standing triumphantly at his lab station, safety goggles askew, hoisting a beaker of shiny, orange goo. “It works!” he announces breathlessly, his face flushed with exhilaration. “The formula works! By God, we’ve done it, lads!”

Cheez Whiz is not without its detractors. Even food scientist Dean Southworth, part of Traisman’s original A-team, derided its modern-day formulation in Michael Moss’s book, Salt Sugar Fat. According to Moss, when Southworth tasted Cheez Whiz again in 2001, he was apoplectic. “What the hell did they do?” he sputtered, then dialed Kraft’s consumer complaints line to rage: “You are putting out a goddamn axle grease!”

Axle grease or not, this processed concoction is clearly going nowhere. Consumer research firm Statista reports that, in 2020, 5.22 million Americans used one pound or more of Cheez Whiz in a week. Of course they did. A schmear of Cheez Whiz renders just about anything palatable, even celery. Where celery is fibrous, tasteless, and dreary, Cheez Whiz is pliant, extroverted, and ready to party. If the price of eating Cheez Whiz is celery, thousands of preschool-aged children willingly pay it every day.

Type “Is Cheez Whiz made of…” into Google’s search bar, and you will be offered the following autocompletions: “real cheese” and “of plastic”. In fact, its label states that it is “Made with Real Cheese” with “No Artificial Flavors or Colors,” which raises more questions than it answers. How, exactly, does one achieve its absurd flavor profile with ingredients sourced from fields and barns? How does one replicate, using natural spices and seasonings, the exact color of Crayola Yellow Orange?

Truthfully, methinks Cheez Whiz doth protest too much. Who, when reaching for Cheez Whiz, is in search of something wholesome, natural, nutritious? When I make the choice to toss it into my shopping cart, I’m not expecting farm-to-table fare. I’m not adhering to the Mediterranean diet or a heart-healthy diet or any other kind of diet. I do not have my mother whispering in my ear about pesticides and chemicals and breast cancer. I am consciously, and actively, thumbing my nose at health, moderation, and good taste. To eat Cheez Whiz is to acknowledge one’s basest desires, and then honour them.  

It’s orange. But it might as well be blue.