Go shopping for cheese at the Ballard Fred Myer in Seattle, and you’ll learn an interesting new fact about your food:
The check-er-outer lady looked at it a while and said (without the slightest trace of irony),
“I don’t think cheese is a dairy product.”
Oh. Um. Well. Yes. Um. WHAT?
“No, they don’t consider cheese a dairy product.”
With that newly created fact, the cashier refused to apply a store coupon for dairy products to a package of cheddar slices. When the columnist for The Stranger asked her who “they” are, she replied, “Fred Meyer Corporation.”
The columnist and his coupon-wielding friend saved the coupon for another day and purchased the cheese at full price, but we have a feeling a lot of our readers would not have let Fred Meyer off so easily.
“Cheese: The Totally Other Food Group. Apparently. Maybe From Space!” [The Stranger] (Thanks to everyone who sent this in!)
(Photo of tomato plant: Aine D)
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And in other breaking news a stocker at a Piggly Wiggly claimed that a tomato is not a vegetable, it’s a fruit.
Do they need to see the film “Where your cheese comes from”
Fruits are the seed-bearing part of the plant. So by that rationale, cucumbers, squash, peppers, and green beans are also fruits.
Plenty of cheese makers in Wisconsin will be shocked they’ve been wasting money buying milk from farmers all these decades.
Duh cheese isn’t a dairy product.
Cheese is its own food group. Things from one food group don’t fit in another.
I thought everyone knew that.
To be fair to the checkout girl, I’ll bet a lot of cheese slices and “cheese in a can” these days aren’t actually made from milk.
Where is my cheese? Someone moved my cheese!
To be fair, some “cheeses” barely qualify as dairy, because the milk content is pretty low. But in this case, I bet it’s not
Behold the power of cheese.
According to Wikipedia, even processed cheese food is made from dairy products with the delightful addition of “emulsifiers, extra salt, food colorings, and/or whey.”
It’s the new controversy that needs to be taught in schools….
Intelligent food production!
God put cows on this planet to test our faith. Cheese is in fact mana from heaven.
I hanker for a hunk a
The post says it was chedder slices. When you slice cheese, the dairy escapes.
This phenomenom is also true of calories in cake. The more you cut it, the more calories escape. That’s why smart women on diets will always ask for a tiny piece – no that’s too big, just a little tiny sliver……..
One stupid cashier says something.. well.. Stupid. So they decide to make a blog post about it because she stupidly and obviously lied saying it was corporate policy. Get a life people. Stupid people are just that.. Stupid. Get over it.
Props to Stinkbug in the original Slog thread:
“You should have used your iphone to show them that their main corporate office mentions cheese on the dairy page:
[recipes.kroger.com]“
Well, some items sold as cheese are so processed and full of artificial additives that depending on the particular product, she may have a point.
I would be worried about eating cheese that the store says isn’t dairy. Maybe they know something about it I don’t.
@speedwell:
@johnfrombrooklyn:
Legally, the tomato is a vegetable in the US:
[en.wikipedia.org]
They should have watched Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
“He said blessed thou are the cheesemakers!”
“Well, not so much the cheesemakers bu the makers of various diary products”
“Oh, well there you go ….big nose”
@SkokieGuy:
I must remember to use this one day soon. It may take some practice to be able to do it with a straight face, though.
Maybe it’s “cheese food” that didn’t come from the dairy department.
-Or maybe it’s government cheese. I don’t think that really qualifies as dairy at all.
Well then why is it that my lactose intolerant wife is in the bathroom for 2 hours if she eats cheese by accident?
Cool, Passover-safe cheese!
As I’ve said before, it’s often not a business’s fault. The quality of the low-level employees is a product of the local school system. Makes the difference between apathy and service
Unfortuately, you can’t *teach* common sense, and some people have an appalling lack of common knowledge, i.e. Canada is a U.S. state, where is Iraq, my Dominican friend’s father is black! Ugh
In fact, some common knowledge seems so uncommon sometimes, I should put “constitutional scholar” on my resume just for knowing the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution
@TomCruisesTesticles: And if I run into enough people who don’t know cheese is dairy, I may add food scientist to my resume
The only logic I can think of is that this place has some expensive high end cheeses available. In those cases you’d probably not want to apply the discount, and instead it was intended for basic things like milk.
@MeSoHornsby: Actually, cheese is pretty low in lactose. So is yogurt. Two hours in the bathroom for accidental ingestion of cheese, which I’m guessing would mean a small amount, is pretty severe. Also, cheese tends to have the opposite effect on people if you know what I mean.
I’m not a principled guy by any means, but I’d fight for the coupon.
It’s not just for the money, you’re combatting stupidity.
@Trickery: 99.999 % of the problems reported here are not from policy, but from ignorant and poorly trained monkeys trying to follow policy. A stupid cashier thinking cheese is not a dairy product, and then not applying a coupon towards it, is no different than a service rep not giving a refund to a caller.
@mariospants: You mean like a cheddar cheese-food byproduct? Like Cheez Whiz Slices? That is definitely not dairy.
Like those meat-food sticks they try to pass for jerky.
Perhaps we are being too harsh?
The OP may have planned to make a Cheese Brassiere from the chedder slices, in which case we are not talking a dairy product, but a stylish garment.
What might a Cheese Brassiere look like? [images.google.com]
I can’t stop laughing at people linking Wikipedia articles as if they were law.
And I mean I already used The Office video once today.
Looks like that cashier needs to spend some time at Bovine University.
@DashTheHand: Don’t you worry about wikipedia! We’ll change it when we get home; we’ll change a LOT of things.
@DashTheHand: If you read the linked article, you’ll notice the previous poster was likely referring to the referenced US court case that *legally* defined the tomato as a vegetable in the US.
I can’t stop laughing at people who instantly dismiss information based on the source without bothering to read it first. Oh wait, yeah I can.
Well at least it was delicious dairy medium cheddar cheese. Had they been attempting to use the coupon for a pack of processed “cheese food” slices I’d say it’s not dairy either. That’s the stuff I feed to me cheese. And THEY wont even eat it!
If this moron cashier can declare dairy isn’t dairy, I can declare her not human and there’s nothing to stop me from shooting her.
I had a cow farmer tell me — no lie! — that cows not only “don’t” eat grass, but that cows CAN’T eat grass!
I was like, “Wow, the CAFOs have definitely won when cow farmers no longer know how to feed cows.”
@SkokieGuy:
Nice… You had to take that class to?
@johnfrombrooklyn: It’s a vegetable for tax purposes. But all its friends call it a fruit. Really, it’s like how some people call me sir and some people call me bro. All about context.
They should have looked at their grocery list and decided whether or not they needed that processed “dairy” product, my guess was that it was not a necessity.
I suggest that when confronted by the cashier they should have cut the cheese.
Oh God, not that stupid book again.
Our CEO mentioned that book to us like it was some kind of gospel, and when I read it I realized that he was just trying to tell us “Oh, by the way, there are going to be some huge changes here and you’re probably not going to like them, but deal with it or find another job. “
Not that the book wasn’t poignant, but man, did I ever feel like I was being talked down to. I can summarize everything that was said in “Who Moved My Cheese?” in one simple phrase:
@TomCruisesTesticles: You mean Canada isn’t our 52nd state (after Puerto Rico of course)!
Wow that’s a newsflash for the lactose intolerant out there. Feel free to eat as much cheese as you want, everyone!
so what IS it classified as?
@GMFish: Uhh… even whey is dairy.
But read the comments on the original article – most likely the register called it a “deli” item since the sliced cheese is over with deli meats and other cold-case items, rendering the coupon useless on that item. FWIW.
Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, I think two different definitions of “dairy product” might be at work here. The most common definition is a food product that fits in the dairy food group. This is what the shopper had in mind and probably what most people think of when they hear the term “dairy product.” Alternatively, “dairy product” could mean a product that is sold in the dairy section of the store. Perhaps this is the definition the store was going by, and the cheese in question was excluded–some supermarkets sell cheese in their deli section, for instance, in addition to the dairy section.
@Inglix_the_Mad: I could see a lot more than shock from them, Velveeta is practically a swear up there.
@Trickery:
So, you’re saying they were right not to accept the coupon because the cashier was “stupid?”