We all love cheese – but is it the true food of love?
Forget the roses, maybe try presenting your true love with a damn fine cheddar this Valentine's Day?
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, so our thoughts understandably turn to notions of love and lust. Yes, there’s the chocolates, the dozen red roses, those fluffy bunny-wunnies - but are we missing a trick when it comes to getting our loved ones loved up? Could it be that cheese is the best way to melt the heart of your special someone? At Homage2Fromage we think it is. And we've got the science to prove it too... Cheese is the ultimate food of love ... and here are FIVE reasons why...
1 They make you feel like you are in love
Cheese is packed with some delicious chemicals called casomorphins. As the name suggests they are related to opiates and trigger the same bits of your brain as both narcotics and love! So, eating cheese with someone generates plenty of dopamine, which in turn contributes to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction in the brain. The result – cheese emulates the feelings of love, making you feel good about whoever you are with.
2 It is the ultimate sharing food
Recent research from the University of Oxford showed that if you eat with others, you are simply more likely to feel happy and satisfied. Eating together increases social bonding and feelings of wellbeing.
What’s more, according to researcher Paul Rozin from Columbia University, there are four different levels of food sharing that express just how romantic you are with your significant other. Top of the list is feeding each other food – and what is better than feeding someone a morsel of delicious cheese?
3 Melted cheese is just sexy
A recent survey by social networking platform Skout indicated that people who eat a lot of toasted cheese appear to have more active sex lives.
And according to one cheese blogger (Alec Scott) the king of all melted cheese – the fondue - is associated with something sexual because of the shared pot of gooey, melty cheese reflects the melting pot of passion and sensuous appreciation of something rather delicious. Perhaps the rather precarious dipping of bread into the hot, bubbling cauldron of cheese reminds us of those first tentative - dangerous - steps into a new, exciting relationship?
4 It's a guilty pleasure
Despite being a vital part of any diet, cheese is seen as something of a forbidden fruit (well not fruit, you know what I mean). There is very much a feeling of sin, that we really shouldn’t be indulging, but we are allowing ourselves to transgress with the Taleggio. It is indulgence pure and simple. So, if you are lucky enough to find someone who loves to indulge as much as you, why not share the moment. It is just between you and them. No-one else needs to know.
5 It just sounds absolutely filthy
The language of cheese is my biggest turn on. Cheese can be hard, but it crumbles, it can be soft and yielding, earthy and sticky, it spreads, melts and ripens, it needs to be warmed, handled, treated with respect maybe, sometimes simply guzzled in a frenzy.... sorry I seem to have drifted off there. But you get the point.
So that’s why I for one will be marching straight past the florists this Valentine's Day, into the cheese shop with an evening of sexy, sultry, sensuous cheese in mind. You can keep your pink teddy bears, I’ll opt for a ripe Camembert every time...