Norvegia

A hard cheese suitable for long time storage. The taste is best described as absent... Not much taste from this one. For some odd reason, someone in the marketing department at Tine meierier, the company that produces this cheese, has stated that this is The People's Choice. I can't see why. Jarlsberg cheese is the people's choice -- a much more tasty cheese.

Anyway, Norvegia comes in three versions:

• Norvegia: 27% fat
• Norvegia light: 14% fat
• Norvegia "vintage": stored for about a year, making it a little harder, and helping the taste evolve a little bit

Well, let me tell you why Norvegia is the people's choice: they have no alternative.

Norwegian supermarkets are utterly depressing places. The vegetable department sells white cabbage, carrots, and, if you're lucky, cucumbers. If you're extremely lucky, onions. The vegetables are easy to spot, being the only objects that aren't in fridges or cardboard boxes.

There is cheese there, thoroughly plastified, produced by Tine, the new fancy trade name used by Norske Meierier, the Norwegian national dairy company.

The cheese comes in three varieties:

• entirely without taste or any other distinctive quality (Norvegia)
• with an acquired aftertaste. obtained by adding whey (brown cheese) - except for the sweet, strange aftertaste and the different colour, it's candle wax just like Norvegia
• the same, only stronger: dark brown candle wax cheese, made out of goat's milk

If I ever moved to Norway, I wouldn't mind the snow.

Let me set your ass straight.

There are no cardboard boxes in my supermarkets. Except from in the storage rooms.
There is a wild variety of veggies in them. Onions? hah! Try some eggplant.

Norvegia is designed to be a mild cheese, in contrast to Jarlsberg, thus making it rather tasteless for people not used to this. It's not only packed in thin plastic, also in various other materials. Whatever suits your mood. Most people like norvegia as an alternative to Jarlsberg and or others (including foreign cheese). Now, if you think there is no foreign cheese here (Norway), you are thoroughly mistaken.

(Clinton likes Norvegia, and .. snow?)