Daiya’s Alfredo Style Deluxe Cheeze Sauce requests your immediate supplication, directing you to massage it in hands before you’ve even gotten to know each other. Out of fear, you find yourself plucking up a pouch and giving it a perfunctory fondle. The Cheeze is aggressive in its silvery confines, bulging in all directions. As you rub it, you wonder how massaging could occur if not with your hands… Betwixt your feet? With a bespoke massaging implement? Such speculation is irrelevant as the Cheeze has made its demand.
With the slightest tear of the pouch, the stuff oozes forth in a kingly cascade before you’ve thought to place a pot beneath it. And why should it deign to wait? This is not some commonplace queso bound by standards of decorum. It is Deluxe Cheeze — never to be trifled with. Once in the pot, it reveals itself to be the gorgeous grey of clam chowder left to mature in the sun all summer. Its odor is one of bright hot salt, which you didn’t know was a smell until this very moment. You study it as it “cooks”: this holy splatter of tapioca, oil, and titanium dioxide. Watching the Cheeze gurgle, inhaling its tangy synthetic essence, you wonder what Aristaeus, the god of cheese-making, would think of your preparation. Might he weep with envy at this ersatz Alfredo’s gelatinous perfection?
Regardless of the substrate, it is layered upon — rotini, broccoli, a timid vegan cutlet—the Cheeze will adhere to your throat faster than melted peanut butter. You’ll gasp and grunt, alarmed at its efficiency at colonizing you. Through the dizzying rush of the sodium-high that accompanies any amount of ingestion, you’ll understand, however, that the Deluxe Cheeze is now your heavenly commander. There shall be no more fickle feta. No more paltry pepper jack. You’ll bow before the pot, silencing your sniveling arteries. How dare they lament? How dare they defy the Daiya?