Jul 17, 2023 4 min read

My mother seldom used a cookbook. I ascribe this to the fact that she married at age 17 and probably simply adapted her mother’s recipes to please the pedestrian palate of my father, who was only 19. When I say pedestrian, I mean that most people would’ve walked away from what he liked to eat.

For example, he liked nothing better than bologna fried in half a stick of butter. For dessert he slathered more butter onto cookies. Hamburgers cooked to his taste resembled hockey pucks in both color and texture. My mother made what she called “potato pancakes,” which consisted of leftover mashed potatoes that she formed into a patty. These she fried in a cast iron skillet until they had a uniformly impenetrable black crust on both sides.

I never knew that a steak could be grilled until my high school girlfriend’s mother served one to me when I was 18. Steak as prepared by my mom was a cheap cut of beef, pounded with a meat tenderizing tomahawk to the point where, had it been able to talk, it would have confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the selling of U.S. atomic secrets to the Commies.

Despite being presented with a home menu that would have fit on one side of a business card, the four kids in my family grew to adulthood. I credit my own survival in large part to the presence of longhorn cheese in our refrigerator and the white bread that Mom made from scratch. As a kid I loved to hack off a chunk of longhorn and a 3-inch-thick slice of crusty bread, then settle in front of the TV. To say that I loved cheese is an understatement: If cheese had said “Yes!” when I first popped the question, we’d now be celebrating our 68th anniversary. But our star-crossed union was not to be.

Don’t get me wrong: I still love cheese. But no matter how much I might be Jonesing for the coagulated, compressed ripened curd of milk separated from the whey, I would not be caught dead eating the “Real Cheeseburger” that Burger King just added to its menus in Thailand. That’s because I’d probably be caught dead after eating it.

The Real Cheeseburger consists of a plain bun surrounding 20 slices of American cheese. For scale, the packages of cheese that most of us buy at the supermarket contain 16 or 24 slices. There is no meat, so a burger, it isn’t. But I guess that the “Real Cheese” wasn’t catchy enough for marketers. “Cheezilla,” maybe, if the sandwich attacks Japan.

The Real Cheeseburger debuted last week at the low introductory price of the equivalent in U.S. dollars of $3.10. It will regularly sell for $10.90, still a bargain compared with the price of custom gourmet burgers sold at many American restaurants. Predictably, sales of the Real Cheeseburger took off after it was mentioned on social media, which drives trends in every area of daily living – even in a country where the typical citizen eats only about 80 grams (around four slices) of cheese per year. But sales may soon melt away: Most diners gave the Real Cheeseburger two thumbs down.

Eric E. Surbano, a writer for the LifestyleAsia website, took friends along to sample the sandwich. “The team and I took a bite of this thing without any condiments,” Surbano wrote, “and it was as revolting as you thought it would be: dry, a shock to the digestive system and literally a thousand calories worth of unnecessary processed cheese.” I might email him to ask exactly what “necessary” processed cheese is.

I could have saved everyone a whole lot of grief. A few years ago, in a proverbial “eyes too big for my belly moment,” I ordered what a local eatery bills as the “Mac Attack.” The $14.99 sandwich consists of shredded cheddar cheese sprinkled onto a large helping of homemade macaroni and cheese, all stuffed between two thick chunks of grilled bread. I left it, half-eaten, on the plate. Had my marriage to cheese come to pass, this sandwich would’ve constituted grounds for a divorce.

My dad, though, would’ve loved the Mac Attack. And the Real Cheeseburger.

Say what you like about my old man, but he knew what was bad for him.