We at SMITH and Memoirville like to say that every person has a story. Jami Bernard, author, reviewer, and Incredible Shrinking Critic, says that every pound has a story too. In her new book, she writes “It’s a story of anger, frustration, old wounds, and carelessness. It’s a story of misjudged portions, too-hasty celebrations, bad planning, misplaced optimism. It’s a story of denial.” Publishers Weekly writes that it is also “endearing and hilarious.”

Below, Bernard meditates on weight loss, veganism, European travel, and—of course—cheese!

Europe, in the Time of Cheese

By Jami Bernard

There were six months of my life during which I renounced cheese, part of an aborted (if well-meaning, healthy-living, planet-saving) attempt at veganism. I look back on that time with chilly fascination as if observing bacteria in a petri dish—look at that carbon life-form choosing to live without dairy! When the only bacteria I ever cared about were the ones that ripen cheese.

It wasn’t until college that I realized the world of cheese went beyond individually wrapped slices of that foul plasticene known as American cheese product, the word “product” an acknowledgment that it was possibly not edible at all, but something from the sort of lab that produces either meals in pouches for astronauts, or monsters with bolts holding their heads in place.

After tasting my first brie (courtesy of a college boyfriend who also introduced me to “salad” and fruit that was not plucked fresh from a can of syrup), I was cheese-crazy. If it melts, stinks, fattens or is spreadable, if it comes in logs or wheels or can be grated like confetti, I have a soft, runny spot for it.

Which made it difficult to lose weight.

To lose 75 pounds, I had to grapple with the foods, emotions, and childhood horrors that seemed to leak fat all over me once I reached my 30s. Cheese was right there in the mix. Although I managed to lose the weight—slowly, less than a pound a week—even now when I speak of cheese I can still hear the addict who boasts in such sensuous detail of kicking the habit that you know the habit has not been kicked, or even nudged. It’s like those people who go to Weight-Watchers meetings so they can yap to a receptive crowd about Oreos, or pedophiles who travel to their behavioral therapists by way of the schoolyard.

Cheese isn’t the most serious of my trigger foods. That would be ice cream and chocolate— perhaps some repetition-compulsion neurosis having to do with the childhood birthday party I never had, or a conical cardboard party hat of nightmares. Cheese I can live without, as shown by my stint as a vegan.

While I’m told that cheese is a “condiment” (who are they kidding?), I continue to treat it as entree, side dish, appetizer, and dessert, perhaps in the same meal. If fondue weren’t so 1960s I’d be ordering it constantly. As it is, there are appetizers in Mexican restaurants I insist on calling queso con queso, and no one tries to correct me.

During my weight loss, I was not always careless with cheese. When I covered the Sundance Film Festival for the Daily News, I walked to all the screenings (at night, in the snow, on the highway) and actually lost weight. But film festivals are “work,” with a certain amount of purpose and discipline already built in, and vacations are … something else. I exhibited less than stellar behavior on a couple of ski vacations in Europe. That’s Europe, home of Really Good Cheese, as well as unsafe cheese, room-temperature cheese, unpasteurized and fresh cheese from cows and goats that have that Euro je-ne-sais-quoi that makes for the tangiest, creamiest cheeses.

I recall a ski vacation to Grindelwald, Switzerland, notable for the tonnage of cheese that found its way to my plate. Considering that I was in the land where Heidi gorged on dairy products while the goats grazed, calorie creep was inevitable. I skied the Jungfrau region and swam in the hotel’s indoor pool to offset at least some of the calories of all that fondue, raclette, “cheese toast” and rosti—often described on menus as “low-fat” or “wellfit.”

But it wasn’t easy. Since Grindelwald is close to Germany, its idea of “health food” is a hearty, starch-thickened stew. No matter what I ordered, the food arrived ensconced in bubbling melted cheese, edges crispy and molded over the edges of the plate. Melted cheese is a culinary sealant over there, applied with caulking gun. The aches from a serious day of skiing could only be ameliorated by a deep pot of fondue (it’s touristy, but still …) and a bottomless mug of gluwein, a rich, warmed wine with mulled spices and sugar. It was like something out of a Monty Python routine: You were met at the bottom of every ski or toboggan run with an oompah band and a vat containing pig’s flesh drowned in cheese.

Plus, mysteriously, a pickle and three cocktail onions.

Another vacation that turned me into a health amnesiac was a ski trip to Val di Fassa in the Italian Dolomites. My downfall, as usual, was failure to plan ahead. In the back of my mind—a murky place to be under the best of circumstances—I figured I’d wing it and occasionally partake of the local delicacies. It was, after all, Italy. Being so close to Austria (at one time the area was actually part of Austria), Val di Fassa offers some of the same cuisine found in German-inflected Grindelwald—an array of dense, fatty meats, now blanketed not in cheese but in thick cuts of bacon and ham. Abbondanza!

Frankly, wrapping a pork chop in bacon is like serving chicken with a soft-boiled egg on the side, a gruesome mother-and-child reunion. Every meat dish bar none came corseted in ham, some of it air-dried for resilience and wrapped so snugly over the main course it was like a plateful of Christmas bundles tied with meaty ribbons and bows. They had as many specialized names for ham as the Eskimos have for snow. I wish I’d copied them down correctly, but after speck, istrione and prosciutto, my notes include a ham that roughly translates to “someone who is passionate about the radio” and another that means “to suffer from.” I return trip to supplement my research is in order.

The mingling of Austrian and Italian cuisine was deadly. My behavior around food while there was—how you say?—non molto bene. Meat platters topped with more meat constituted the main course. But you can’t just plunge right in—it could be a shock to the system—so first they soften you up with a huge plate of pasta lacquered with self-stick cream sauce. Bracketing the meal would be an appetizer (perhaps melon and prosciutto to keep the “ham” theme going) and a dessert combining the heaviest elements in the periodic table, like strudel and gelato. Breakfast and dinner were included in the room rate. (The breakfast buffet offered, oddly, linzer tortes.) So you have to eat them, otherwise … I think I hear my grandmother calling from beyond the grave: “It’s money down the drain!”

That just left lunch. Skip lunch, you say? Never! My friends and neighbors Kathie and Hal Aaron had organized the trip, but Hal had severed his Achilles tendon while skiing the week before, and Delta had lost Kathie’s luggage and skis. I couldn’t very well leave my gracious hosts alone in their pain! So I’d ski half a day, then meet them at La Grotta for pizza and gelato. La Grotta’s menu had page upon page describing its pizzas. I had no idea what I was ordering—I’d learned only enough Italian to tell the van driver: “I’d like my beer in a glass”—so I ordered mystery toppings like bracioletta or the sublimely named stinco (which turned out to be knuckle of veal). Gorgonzola needed no translation.

Once the groaning pizzas had been packed away with only an occasional crust to betray that food had once occupied the plate, it was time … no, not for another ski run, or a trip to town to buy gifts for friends, or a workout at the hotel gym or even a shvitz in the sauna. No, it was time for gelato, buckets of it, topped with a sugar-candy-mountain of panna (cream). In honor of the Austro-Italian connection I’d ask for my trencher of gelato mit schlag, but schlag by any other name is still panna, and maybe a heart attack.

Hal is an excellent chef in his spare time, and he and Kathie appreciate the eros of fine dining. There are probably people in the world who eat simply because they must, but dining with Hal and Kathie is like worshipping at the altar of divine edibles. They don’t go for just anything, mind you, only great food—the right yeasty pizza dough, stracciatella gelato whose delicate whorls of chocolate shavings startle from within a swirling tunnel of vanilla.

The gelato, by the way, was served in a flared Murano glass bowl, as befits such treasure.

The third time we met at La Grotta for lunch, K&H’s friend Tony came along. Tony, like Hal, is a black-diamond skier who burns calories like rocket fuel, but I’ve rarely witnessed the pleasured abandon with which he ordered and consumed. He drenched his pizza with olive oil, then pinched up a slice with his hand, American-style, and salted it as if about to bake it in one of those rock-hard salt crusts that you hammer open. We’d barely finished our pizzas with their kaleidoscope of fleshy, marbled toppings when Tony magisterially ordered straciattella grande. We all followed suit, only to find that special dessert pails had to be located just to accommodate this treat, like finding a sling to hoist those super-heavy people from their beds when they need hospitalization.

Our mountainous desserts were so high they had their own weather system, and their distant peaks were capped mit schlag. Down below, among gelati boulders whose size suggested the carvings of Easter Island, the weather was clear and cold. Up top it was cloudy mit schlag, with low visibility and, if eaten in its entirety, a high mortality rate.

I ate it in its entirety. Then I took a nice long Italian nap, the kind that takes you right through to dinner.

Jami Bernard is a social observer and film critic, most recently for the NY Daily News. Her seventh book, The Incredible Shrinking Critic—75 Pounds and Counting: My Excellent Adventure in Weight Loss, has just been published by Penguin (Avery).