Cheese used to be Cheddar, in two colours: white and orange. I have no idea why mild (i.e., young) Cheddar had to be (and still is) orange in Ontario. Old cheddar was (and still is) white.

Fancy cheese came from Oka, a Trappist monastery just over the border in Quebec, and it was (and still is) round and semi-soft with a gentle whiff of adulthood and, just maybe, port after dinner.

Another type of fancy cheese was Danish blue, which was not Danish or even European but just as Canadian as all the other cheese we ate. It had visible mold in it and therefore seemed risky. Its complex and decidedly emphatic flavour announced its status as food intended only for the grown-ups of the household. Consequently, we children insisted we loved it, though we actually had second thoughts after the first bite.

Fake cheese was Kraft plastic-wrapped slices or a hunk of Velveeta, and it, too, was always orange because it was pretending to be mild Cheddar. Its proper habitat was the sandwich lunch your mother made for you to take to school, and it tasted of nothing much in particular unless she augmented it with a sliced pickle, in which case it tasted of sliced pickle.