8 Unspoken Truths Behind ‘I Could Never Give Up Cheese’ – Insights on Embracing Change

I was scrolling through plant-based recipe videos when I noticed it—the comment that appears beneath every single one like clockwork. “Looks great but I could NEVER give up cheese.” Sometimes it’s in all caps. Sometimes with crying emojis. Sometimes followed by lengthy explanations about pizza Friday traditions or their grandmother’s lasagna recipe. The predictability of it has become its own internet phenomenon, spawning memes and drinking games and eye-roll reactions from vegans who’ve heard it ten thousand times.

But lately I’ve been thinking about what’s really happening in that reflexive declaration. The speed with which people rush to announce their cheese dependency before anyone’s even asked them to change anything. The defensive crouch, the preemptive strike against a threat that hasn’t materialized. We’re not really talking about dairy products here. We’re watching people process the mere suggestion of change in real time, and what they’re revealing runs much deeper than their relationship with mozzarella.

1. “I’ve already decided this is impossible without actually trying”

The cheese declaration usually arrives before any actual attempt at reduction, let alone elimination. Within seconds of seeing a cashew-based alfredo sauce, someone’s already typing their surrender. A friend recently told me she “could never” work from home because she needs the office environment—this after her company mandated remote work and she discovered she actually loved it. But cheese occupies a special category of impossibility, perhaps because we’ve literally grown up with dairy industry messaging about its irreplaceability.

Behavioral scientists have found that we consistently overestimate the difficulty of changes we haven’t attempted. The immediate leap to “never” reveals how we protect ourselves from the discomfort of even imagining change. It’s easier to declare something impossible than to sit with the possibility that it might merely be difficult, or worse—that it might be easy and we’d have to question why we hadn’t done it sooner.

2. “My identity is more fixed than I want to admit”

“I’m Italian, I can’t give up cheese” might be the most common variation, followed closely by Wisconsin natives and the French. Food becomes shorthand for cultural belonging, and questioning one feels like questioning the other. But this defensive positioning suggests we view our identities as far more rigid than they actually are. Research on food and cultural identity shows that dietary choices become entangled with our sense of self in ways that make change feel like betrayal.

The revealing part is watching people who do eventually change their eating habits navigate this supposed identity crisis. My Italian-American neighbor who went dairy-free discovered that her Nonna was more interested in feeding her something delicious than policing the presence of cashew cream in the lasagna. “She just wanted me to eat,” she told me, laughing about her previous anxiety. Culture, it turns out, is more flexible than we give it credit for—it’s our stories about culture that stay rigid.

3. “I’m anxious about being judged for my choices”

There’s a peculiar social dynamic where announcing your limitations becomes a form of protection. By declaring cheese non-negotiable, you’re signaling that you’re not one of those people—the joyless ones, the difficult dinner guests, the ones who make everything complicated. It’s preemptive social positioning, like apologizing for your messy house before anyone’s even noticed.

I’ve watched this play out at countless dinner parties. The person who makes the biggest deal about how they “could never” give up cheese is often sitting next to someone who quietly hasn’t eaten it in years. Yet the cheese-declarer rarely notices, too busy performing their normalcy to see that nobody actually cares what’s on their plate.

4. “I don’t actually know what I’m capable of”

Most of us have no idea what we can adapt to until circumstances force our hand. The pandemic proved this on a massive scale—suddenly everyone who “could never” work from home, homeschool kids, or go without restaurants discovered they could indeed do all these things. Not happily, perhaps, but capably.

The cheese thing is particularly telling because many people who make this declaration have already navigated far more challenging changes. They’ve survived divorces, changed careers, moved across the world, learned new languages. One woman I know learned to walk again after an accident, but insists she lacks the willpower to try oat milk in her coffee. The disconnect suggests we’re terrible at accurately assessing our own adaptability—or perhaps we reserve our resilience for changes we don’t choose.

5. “Change feels like loss, and I’m already grieving”

When someone immediately jumps to “I could never give up cheese,” they’re often responding to an anticipated sense of deprivation. The speed of the response suggests they’re not considering what they might gain—better digestion, new flavors, alignment with values, whatever motivates people to make this change. They’re fixated entirely on the loss.

This isn’t surprising given what psychological research on loss aversion tells us: we feel losses about twice as strongly as equivalent gains. The mere thought of losing cheese triggers a grief response that overwhelms any potential benefits. It’s a pattern that plays out whether we’re talking about dietary changes, career moves, or relationship decisions. We mourn the loss before we’ve even experienced it, sometimes before we’ve even decided to make the change.

6. “I need you to know I’m not extreme”

In our current cultural moment, any deviation from the norm risks being labeled extreme. The cheese declaration serves as a social signal: “I’m reasonable, I’m moderate, I’m not going to make anyone uncomfortable.” It’s particularly absurd because eating cheese isn’t exactly a brave stance—it’s literally what most people already do. It’s like announcing loudly that you drive a car or own a television.

But the need to announce it suggests anxiety about being perceived as radical for even engaging with plant-based content. Watching a vegan recipe video becomes something that requires a disclaimer, as if the algorithm might otherwise assume you’ve joined a commune. The comment section becomes a space for performed normalcy, where people reassure each other that they’re not taking any of this too seriously. “Love this recipe except for the no-cheese part!” they type, establishing their credentials as a rational person who would never actually change.

7. “I haven’t interrogated why this feels so important”

The vehemence of the cheese attachment often surprises even the people expressing it. Ask follow-up questions and you’ll frequently hear: “I don’t know, I just can’t imagine it.” The emotion precedes the reasoning. We feel strongly about keeping things the same, then backward-engineer justifications for why change is impossible.

A colleague once spent ten minutes explaining why she could never give up cheese, citing everything from calcium needs (easily met through other foods) to her French heritage (France has a growing vegan population) to the impossibility of pizza without mozzarella (tell that to the Neapolitans who invented pizza marinara). When she finally paused, she laughed: “I don’t even eat that much cheese. Maybe a sprinkle of parmesan once a week.” The defense was disproportionate to the actual role cheese played in her life.

8. “I’m more comfortable with problems than solutions”

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the cheese phenomenon is that it often comes from people who’ve already acknowledged problems with dairy—ethical concerns, lactose intolerance that they “power through,” environmental impact they feel guilty about. They’ll preface their declaration with “I know dairy is terrible for the environment, but…” The problem has been accepted; it’s the solution that’s rejected.

This captures something essential about how we relate to change. We’re often more comfortable living with acknowledged problems than taking steps to address them. It’s the same psychology that keeps people in jobs they hate or relationships that expired years ago. The cheese declaration becomes a way of saying: “I see the issue, I validate your concerns, but I’m choosing the familiar discomfort over the unfamiliar solution.”

Final words

What strikes me most about the cheese declarations is their uniformity. Across cultures, ages, and backgrounds, people reach for nearly identical phrases to express their resistance. It’s as if we’re all working from the same script for deflecting change, whether we’re talking about food choices or any other shift that asks us to reconsider our habits.

The internet has given us a perfect laboratory for watching this psychology play out in real time, comment by predictable comment. Each “I could never give up cheese” is a tiny window into how we process the possibility of change—with immediate resistance, performed identity, anticipatory grief, and ultimately, a choice to stay exactly where we are.

The next time you catch yourself saying “I could never,” about anything, it might be worth pausing to wonder what you’re really protecting. The answer definitely isn’t cheese. It’s the comfortable fiction that we already know the limits of who we can become.