Opinion | Mayor Eric Adams’s war on cheese addiction in New York – The Washington Post

New York had not been the same since the mayor’s War on Cheese began in earnest. Since his observation that food was like a drug and that it was difficult to tell the difference between someone hooked on heroin and someone hooked on cheese, the enforcement priorities of the city had been altered. Cheese had been added to the list of controlled substances, and its possession was now a felony. The city was on high alert, not moving a muscle, scarcely daring to brie.She had cut her teeth on the softer gateway cheeses — mozzarella and ricotta and the occasional goat. Then she’d worked up to harder stuff — Gruyère, Parmesan, cheddar so sharp it could cut you. It saddened her to see how cheese had taken over the culture. Kids, using the lingo, calling things “grate,” or thinking the cheese lifestyle was cool because they saw people on TV eating indulgent individual slices of Red Hawk or going to work after devouring an entire wheel of Humboldt Fog and suffering no consequences.The apartment was opulent. L’Arson looked around. Spread out on a large table in the main dining area was a little wire cutter thing that went up and down like a guillotine, a big wooden board that was half-covered in cured meats and half-empty, and a fondue pot with tiny forks lined up next to it.Since the mayor’s decree, the newspapers were full of sad tales of people who had tried to make cheese at home and just filled their fridges with mold, people consuming improperly strained ricottas half-stuck in their cheesecloths — and not a whiff of pasteurization. Was it really better, really safer, to drive all cheese production underground like this?None of it seemed just or like a good use of resources, but L’Arson had not stopped to question. The mayor knew what he was talking about. He wasn’t just saying things. That would be ridiculous. There was only one explanation: They were not over-policing cheese; they were under-policing everything else.“Surely you’ve got something better to do than harass ordinary citizens who just need a slice of something processed to get through the end of the week,” the other said. “Over in the fancy apartments by the park, there are people just eating burrata, aged Limburger, and you don’t hassle them. This system is broken.”