Granny won me over with the government cheese. As a child, maybe 4 or 5 years old, when I’d visit her on occasional Sundays in Blue Ridge, Georgia, she’d slice me off a little treat — an orange rectangle from a brown cardboard box in the refrigerator. We would sit around her kitchen table, where she held court with my aunts by telling stories and making plans for canning vegetables. Sometimes the aunts smoked cigarettes, which they’d quickly stamp out when my preacher-grandfather came around the corner. Nevermind that my snack was processed and inexpensive, a generic type of Velveeta. In those days at Granny’s, sitting with my cheese and the grown-ups in our rural mountain town, I might as well have been tasting Camembert on the banks of the Seine.
Nevermind, too, the Mason jars of homemade soup on her shelves, a kaleidoscope of summer’s bounty — tomatoes, okra, corn — put up and waiting to take the chill off colder days. Nevermind the freshly baked pound cakes under Tupperware domes like trophies, which she kept atop the washing machine, also in the kitchen, or the biscuits she could whip up with nary a measuring device or recipe. I would learn to appreciate all those later. As a kid, the cheese wowed me.
My mother tried to explain that it was a commodity provided by government funding for the school cafeteria where my grandmother worked. “Maybe you shouldn’t mention the cheese,” Mom said recently, when I told her about writing this story. She has a good point. Folks don’t like to hear the words processed and school food in the same sentence. And Mom wouldn’t want people to think Granny was somehow taking advantage of the system. But don’t worry, Mom. The cheese is part of the point. I want people to know how Granny believed in wasting nothing, in sharing everything. In cooking from scratch as often as possible but also making do with every resource provided to her. And, yes, she sometimes had leftover cheese at home, but she also got in trouble for sneaking extra food into the paper sacks of kids without lunch money or even handing food out the back of the lunchroom screen door. “Situational ethics,” my cousin Susie calls it. I’d come to understand all that later. But as a kid, I just knew Granny’s job was cool.