plain white cheese...yet so much more

A number of years ago, during one of his first visits to Vancouver, my then fourteen-year-old cousin Uri asked me, artlessly, "How do you say gvina levana in English?" I looked at him, somewhat baffled by his loss for such simple words (after all, Uri had by the age of ten developed an exceptionally sophisticated English vocabulary, thanks to countless successive hours spent watching "The Simpsons"), and offered what I thought to be the simplest and most straightforward of answers: "white cheese." He looked dissatisfied.

Little did I realize then that the term gvina levana defies translation. In Israel, it is a way of life. The average Israeli family goes through five 200-gram containers of it per week (I'm totally making up the statistic, but I don't think I could be far off). I have witnessed children under the age of two polish off an entire container in one sitting (again, I'm exaggerating, but not much). Civil wars have been fought over it (okay, that one's a downright lie). Upon entering any grocery store (makolet), convenient store (tsorkhania) or supermarket (wait for the translation...super) one is bound to encounter a vast array of seemingly identical cylindrical tubs filled with it.

Now, I say seemingly identical because, in fact, this vast array presents many tricky choices. First of all: white cheese or cottage cheese (allow me to teach you another sophisticated Hebrew word: kotej)? (I'll spare you the confusion and leave labane and cream cheese out of the picture, let alone feta and Bulgarian cheese from cow or goat, in blocks, strips or cubes...it's exhausting, really.) There's the question of brand: Tnuva or Strauss? Now we come to the matter of milk fat: 9%, 5%, 3% or 1/2%?

I thought I had selected my pick: tnuva brand, white cheese, 5% milkfat. How naive. I soon realized that the matter is infinitely more complicated. Yesterday, I opened the lid of a new package, peeled off the plastic protective layer, spread it on a piece of bread, and -- ack! -- saw flecks of green! What is that?! MOLD?! I picked up the piece of plastic I had just torn off -- oh no! Printed in small letters below the brand name were the words I had so recklessly overlooked: "with OLIVES"! Yes, my friends, that's right, the white cheese industry has expanded to produce FLAVORED cheeses. I must be more careful next time.

NOTE: I forgot to mention gvina levana's equally sly and slippery stepsister: gvina tsehuba (yellow cheese). But that's a whole other adventure in the making.