>>>But blue cheese, even when 100% genuine, is not a preference, not an acquired distaste. It's simply not sitting well with my digestion. After just one bite it throws me into a dilemma - did I puke already or should I now?
>
>Then you should try some real Munster cheese- not that bland Muenster stuff you get in the US, but proper Alsatian munster.

As that french guy said, "american cheese is dead - it's made of dead milk and sold in a body bag". I've tried several things in the US and same things outside, and there's always a difference. For one, the Ballantine sold in the US is sour, just like any southern whiskey; even some canadian that I tried was. Same Ballantine outside of the US is normal. A friend from India took me to dinner to a place with proper cuisine, ordered indian beer - and then appologized for misrepresenting India, "this is not indian beer anymore, it's americanized". So I've learned to never trust anything sold in the US wearing other nation's label. Heck, their industry bought a law whereby they can label olive oil as "italian" when it contains at least 7% of oil of italian origin. Or was it 11%... irrelevant.

So yes, I ate that american munster, and it's just another cheese(like) product, not a cheese per se. It's somewhat less bad than the rest, not too bad but no joy either.

> If you recall the quips about smelly French cheese: Munster is the archetypal stinker, capable of ponging out any fridge followed by whole kitchen if you dare open the fridge door. That's assuming you put it in the fridge rather than setting it on a larder shelf to announce its presence to the neighborhood 24/7.

Once in Germany I did try some nasty stinker... from a distance it resembled fresh manure. The host made it a quest, as in "you eat this or you get no other cheese" after I cut a slice, tried it and made a face. Well, challenge accepted and I ate it. Then the next few days we annoyed everybody else - that cheese was absent from the dish and I asked for it... and the host thought he tortured me enough, but no, now I learned to like it, so until he and I ate the rest of it, everyone else had to endure the aroma. Dunno what it was called, but it was yellow, slightly translucent, sausage shaped and about 40mm in diameter. Somewhere around Stuttgart.