If you weren’t homeless or destitute or prone to dreaming about Kraft Singles, how long would you stand in line for free cheese? In Tillamook, Oregon it would appear to be a daily habit and thousands and thousands of our nation’s most lactose-tolerant will stand on line until, well, until the cows come home for what amounts to a sweaty little handful of cheese cubes. At first, it appears to be a sickness, the kind that makes fat people fatter, but then it suddenly becomes endearing and American and, finally, you realize that these free-cheese-cube-hander-outers should be celebrated as the shrewd cheddar pimps they truly are.

It’s a fascinating little enterprise and a delicious bit of field research for a social scientist like myself.

From dawn to dusk the cow crowd arrives in waves and treads up the concrete ramp into the “cheese castle” at Tillamook. A few turn out for farm-to-table science lessons and to learn the ins-and-outs of curds and whey, but most are compelled by cheese consumption. Some are surely tourists, shipping in from dairy farms far and wide but it seems obvious that many in the throng are locals on their way to work because, why settle for Starbucks when there’s free cheese?

To say that most of the patrons were fat farmers with a cheese addiction would be mean-spirited and factually unprovable, but from my personal assessment, there seemed to be a lot of fat farmers very, very fond of cheese.

The line to get to the free cheese was much like the line to get on the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland. Children trained in the cheesy ways were giddy in the same way you are when you’re in the line to sit on Santa’s lap. Conversely, most of the adults seemed more serious, going through complex calculations in their minds to decipher the maximum number of cheese cubes they could snatch and/or consume within the thirty seconds or so they would be able to stand in front of the cheese bins.

These cheese bins present curious dilemmas as it pertains to cheese-eating etiquette. There are six identical bins on either side of the cheese-tasting kiosk. Each holds hundreds of cheese cubes of a different variety.

One-point-seven billion toothpicks are provided in aluminum trays for the purpose of stabbing cheese cubes … and this where good table manners head out to pasture. Is it one cube per toothpick? Do you stab as many cubes as one toothpick can possibly hold? If you stabbed three white-cheddar-with-black-pepper cubes with one toothpick and then stuck the whole thing in your mouth devouring the contents like a Greek polishing-off a lamb-kabob skewer, do you go back in with the same toothpick?

People do. People put the toothpick they ate from back in the metal trays of virgin toothpick. Some dudes say fuck the whole concept and plunge their mitts right into the cube piles. How many four-hundred-pound farmers with dirty, cheese hands would it take before you soured on the idea of free cheese?

♦

On the way out I saw a guy, blue-collar type, running one of those Coleman-type skillets off of a propane tank in the back of his pick-up. He was warming up some flour tortillas and then one by one a bunch of kids started showing up at the truck. Each had a pocketful of cheese squares which they then dropped on to the cooking tortillas and before you knew it – fresh quesadillas for all my friends! The cheddar version of American ingenuity.

Name one other country where you can walk around with free cheese in your pockets?