> They were also super-frugal, so perhaps there is some truth to what you are saying, but really, to this day, they have a very simple mental model of cheese, so they don't know (or care to know) what they are missing.

I immigrated from India to North America very young (in elementary school), but this was true for me as well, and it took a long time for me to _understand_ cheese and its varieties. I'd expand on that and say that the same held true for bread, jams and jellies, and cured meats as well.

My mental model of cheese was "gummy plastic Kraft slices", and I didn't eat much of those because they didn't provide much in the way of taste. My mental model of bread was "gummy white wonder-bread". My mental model of jams and jellies was some generic bottle of smuckers strawberry. My mental model of cured meats was some oversalted hunk of ham. Mental model of syrup was a bottle of Aunt Jemimah's.

It was a full 15 years of living here before it dawned on me the rich variety of tastes and textures that comprised these foods, and how they could be combined and incorporated into meals. Most of that I owe to eating (out of a sense of obligation) home-made high-quality food prepared by people who had invited me to their homes. Even then, it took a few years until I put two and two together and made the connection that somehow _these people_ were making delicious things out of these foods, and I was somehow not encountering them myself in my own choices.

When I finally burst through to the other side of that, it was a revelation. Cheese was cheddar and jack and gouda and brie and oka and all sorts of other wonderful tastes and textures. Bread was rye and sourdough and pumpernickel and calabrese. Jams were rhubarb and black currant and ginger and marmalade. Cured meats were kolbasa and proscuitto and genoa and soprasatta. Syrups were maple and molasses.

In my childhood days in India, we would sometimes go out and buy exotic "western" food from the store - and this was before India's markets had opened up - so what you were able to obtain were all these singular examples - Wonderbread white, some generic paste of a jam, some processed cheese.

We would eat these and the novelty would hold my interest, but at the back of my mind I felt a bit sorry for those westerners. "This is all they subsist on?" I would wonder.. "how sad".

That implicit bias stayed with me as a child, even after I came over, and influenced my choices in food. Even with all the opportunity to sample a broader range of examples, one must _motivate_ oneself to do so. You have to go out of your way to go to a cheese shop, and try a few, and experiment with them. Why do that when you have already made up your mind that there is nothing more there than what you have already seen?

It was a revelatory event when I finally understood what I was missing, and how I had ended up in that circumstance, and how my biases had guided me into a constrained existence where I had denied myself exposure to these wonderful things.

I take it as a lesson learned, more generally, about prior biases and how they can influence my choices so that I mold my own environment to be blind to things I could otherwise have experienced.