I am thinking that cheese is the most useful food ever invented. You may say, “Bread. Bread is the universal food.” But bread is pretty blah without cheese. Whereas cheese without bread is still absolutely perfect.

Now let’s take a serious look at bread. It has a relatively short shelf life. It gets stale within about a week, and then you cannot do much with it but make croutons or stuffing. Croutons go a long way, because they are only good on top of salads. And who wants to eat more than one green salad per month? Stuffing is pretty awesome, but even I can get full of stuffing after five or six helpings.

Cheese, on the other hand, can sit around in the cheese drawer of your refrigerator for months without getting into too much trouble. If it gets stale and hard, it is then great for grating onto pizzas and quesadillas. If it gets moldy, you can cut off the moldy bits and the rest of the cheesy bits are just dandy. Moldy bread? Worthless except for science fair projects.

When you eat bread, you can either have it straight up or toasted. Either way, it tastes like plain old bread unless you enhance it with jelly, mayonnaise, or cheese. To have a tasteful sandwich, you need something between your slices of bread. Two lonely slices of bread do not a sandwich make.

But cheese. Two slices of cheese are a feast. You can stash salami between them for a salami sandwich. You can tuck a cracker between them for an appetizer. You can grill them to a golden brown. You can fill them with veggies. You can cover them with mustard or mayo, and roll them up with a slice of ham. Cheese is flexible.

I would just bet there are way more varieties of cheese than bread, too. I have seen “cheese of the month” clubs. But I have never seen “bread of the month” clubs. So maybe there are not enough tasty varieties of bread to cover twelve months. I have personally sampled white bread, sourdough white bread, Hawaiian white bread, French white bread, and Italian white bread. Beyond that is uncharted wheat territory for me.

However, I have never tasted a cheese I did not like. Hard cheese. Soft cheese. Stinky cheese and squeeze cheese. Blue cheese. Goat cheese. String cheese and Velveeta. They are all wonderful.

Cheese with cranberries in it and cheese with peppers in it give me my fruit and veggie servings for the day. Cheese with coffee beans keeps me caffeinated. Cheese with port wine is fine. Cheese with bacon bits for breakfast and cheese with maple syrup for second breakfast.

And what about cheesecake? Two of the world’s greatest food concepts, whisked together and baked in a graham cracker crust. Just try to do that with a slice of white bread, and see what you get.

Jackie Hope is the longest running Dickinson Press contributor and columnist. "Hope's Corner" is a weekly humorous column centered on a message of hope for residents in southwest North Dakota.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Dickinson Press, nor Forum ownership.