I’m sorry, but once you blend it up with over 50% other stuff, it’s no longer cheese. For example, we call some better concoctions made with cheese “cheese spread”. American cheese itself has a lot of varying quality, some is largely cheese mixed with other dairy products and emulsifiers. Others, like Kraft Singles, are largely artificial.
We should absolutely limit naming in order to protect proper, traditional processes like those used in cheese making. Processes which produce healthier products, that don’t rely on approximations of nutrient content, while missing out on lesser nutrients that we might not understand yet. Unfortunately, ultraprocessed foods have become so normalized, that most people seem to read right through the labels and ignore the fact that they’re eating largely artificial foods.
I can see the benefit of a more lightly processed American cheese in melting applications. I prefer using melty cheeses like Muenster or Danish Fontina on things like burgers, or a richer cheese combined with a touch of sodium citrate to aid melting in others like soups. But some folks will even use a slice or two of American cheese along with a better cheese, in place of sodium citrate.
Hell, I had fairly supportive parents, and I barely held on. But in some sense, I really just prolonged things. Dwelling on the same thing for decades, through changing perspectives.
There are so many traveling kids out there. The types who sell wrapped stones and hemp bags at street festivals, drifting in and out of communal living situations, camps, etc.
I flirted with all that when I was younger, still think about just taking off in my car sometimes. Ok, a lot of the time. It’s pretty tempting for a lot of us to just say fuck it, and drop out of society and into a counter culture, or a nice intentional community.