Brie encounter

摘要

How do you deal with a perilous cheese? Caerphilly. It's a cheesy joke to be sure, but does it contain a morsel of truth? Charles Dickens certainly thought food and fear were connected. When Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted with the ghost of his late partner Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, he at first assumes it is a night terror brought on by eating a "crumb of cheese". Whether or not Dickens's tale played a part, the idea that eating cheese causes scary, possibly nightmarish, dreams is an enduring urban myth. It crops up in several nations - flick through French health magazines, for instance, and you will find stories linking cauchemars with fromage. But is there anything in it? Finding evidence or explanations for how cheese might influence the subconscious can feel like ghost-hunting - the few experiments so far have been woefully unscientific.