Phrase of the Day: Government Cheese
I assumed that "Government cheese" referred to some kind of government assistance, but I didn't realize that the term is pejorative.
When I was thinking about it this morning I was reminded of an episode of "The West Wing" (season one) when the senior staff meets with various special interest groups who would otherwise never have an audience in the White House. They usually have wacky interests that they all end up laughing at - a highway for wolves, UFOs, cartographers who claim all maps are upside-down, etc. It's called "Big Cheese Day", with a reference to some president who used to put a huge block of cheese out for anyone to come and eat from it. I think that's how it goes.
Cheese. Government. That's why I thought of it.
Trivia: Martin Sheen(President Bartlet on "West Wing")'s birthname is Ramon Gerard Antonio Estevez. His dad was a Spanish Cuban and Sheen is a stage name. That explains why his kids have different last names (Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, etc.)
posted by sarahanne @ 9:30 PM
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I had to look up pejorative. :)
It's funny, because some seem to brag about growing up on "government cheese", like it validates street credibility (which I don't really have). hehe
My family wasn't really poor growing up, but my mom volunteered with this program called "brown bag" or something like that. The grocery-shopping equivilent of meals on wheels. Anyway, they would deliver bags with random graceries to certian families, and if there ws stuff left over sometimes we got some. Sometimes we got these blocks of cheese that came in plain brown cardboard packaging that had USDA info printed on it.. Same thing? I dunno.
I thought government cheese was the type of things you could by with food stamps.
You probably didn't experience this in Sillicon Valley :) but in my town, at Jackson's IGA Foodliner, there actually would be signs on food items that I am almost positive would say "Government cheese" or "Government Milk" etc.
It was a big joke in elementary school that your sandwiches were government cheese sandwiches.
Just so you know, as a little added bonus, the IGA was the same store that if you bought meat there...you could peel off the labels and often find more than one expiration date. It was SCARY!
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