The Spiral String Cheese Incident

When Crankenstein was still in training, we used to fantasize about how our lives might change once she was an attending physician. We wouldn’t be tied to any one place geographically, as you are during medical school, residency and fellowship, and her compensation would increase dramatically, allowing us to finally make progress on her staggering student loan debt.

Our plans were admittedly modest. While some of her classmates plotted to reward themselves with luxury watches or expensive cars, she imagined going to the nicest grocery store in town and buying any cheese she wanted, rather than having to choose between a handful of Aldi’s Emporium Selections. My goal was to stop using Tracfones* and purchase a Tennis Channel streaming subscription. But, she cautioned, “No matter how financially successful we are in life, we’ll always look poor naked.”

That remains the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me — and possibly the truest. Sure, if you saw Crankenstein naked you’d probably assume she possesses an adequate emergency fund and makes monthly contributions to a retirement account. But if you saw me naked, you would charitably estimate my net worth at all of 14 cents. As Luann de Lesseps attempted to sing, “Money can’t buy you class/Elegance is learned,” and my body’s an unwilling student.

Residency and fellowship were lean years for us, even though we worked more than full-time. That’s why we kept the house I’d been prepping to sell when Crankenstein and I met (my mortgage was less than her rent) and why our dates were mostly at libraries, museums and other free or low-cost attractions. It’s why we had an inexpensive wedding and brown-bagged our workday lunches, which precipitated the spiral string cheese incident.

To fully appreciate its absurdity, you have to understand that Crankenstein and her friends have impeccable academic pedigrees — they were generally educated and trained at any of the top five or 10 medical schools in the country. Some are physician-scientists who will eventually run their own labs at those schools. It’s common for them to have been so immersed in their studies during their teens and twenties that they’re strangely clueless about non-academic matters well into adulthood.

That is how an otherwise brilliant woman came to practically gasp at the sight of the Aldi-purchased food in front of Crankenstein during a lunch break years ago. Studying her string cheese stick, Crankenstein innocuously noted that the spirals weren’t as tight as usual: “It wasn’t like a double helix, it was a little loosey-goosey,” she remembers. Her friend looked over and asked “Those are supposed to be spirals? Who made that?”

When Crankenstein answered “Happy Farms,” her friend thought the name was a joke. “It’s an Aldi brand,” Crankenstein explained, and the friend’s face scrunched in horror. “Aldi?” she repeated, as if she couldn’t believe that Crankenstein — who’d grown up on Aldi staples — would deign to shop there. “Then the spirals make sense — don’t they sell Trader Joe’s rejects?”

That simple question, so earnestly posed, has become grocery lore in our household. And every time I stop my cart at the wall of cheese in Aldi’s dairy section to survey my options, as I did this afternoon following Carlos Alcaraz’s Wimbledon semifinal victory, I pause to glance up at the spiral string cheese while thinking “Looks like they’re still fucking things up at the Trader Joe’s factory.”

*I moved away from Tracfone once her fellowship concluded but didn’t get my first ‘real’ smartphone, an entry-level iPhone SE, until I was in my late thirties.

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