Dressed as an import

Every word on the front of some cheese packets on a Cairo supermarket shelf is in English. Where it was made is printed small on the back, and sometimes the answer is just outside the city.

The packet is dressed that way for a reason, and the reason is old.

There was a time when cheese from abroad was simply the safer buy. It had travelled cold, it tasted the same every time, and you were never going to unwrap a sour block in front of guests.

Safe became a signal. The foreign block on the table said something about the household that set it there. A family stretched thin could still put it out when people came to visit.

Then the signal became a way of belonging. Your mother bought that one, the neighbours served it, and a table without it looked a little careless. Ask a shopper now and she will tell you she simply prefers the taste.

Meanwhile the reason quietly went away. Much of what is made nearby has caught up, and keeping cheese cold is no longer the gamble it once was. The preference stayed anyway, and the makers who understood that dressed their cheese in English to meet it.

What she calls taste is mostly memory: what was safe, then what was respectable, then what was normal in the house she grew up in. Very little of it is about the cheese in her hand today.

If that much status can settle on a block of white cheese, it is worth asking what it does to the things people buy precisely to be seen with: the watch, the perfume, the car parked outside.