Sunday Rerun: This is whey too crazy

 I think that the people who sit in the bigwig offices at America's leading corporations sometimes sit around and think too much.

Witness this latest legal action, filed by Kraft Foods.  Kraft is the manufacturer of Cracker Barrel cheese.  This is the leading brand of big-chunk cheddar cheese; they make 20 styles of it in wedges and bars, and, God bless our laziness, they will even sell it to you in cracker-sized slices, saving us the arduous task of taking a knife and actually slicing our own cheese.

They've got their Roquefort in an uproar because the popular Cracker Barrel Country Store chain is planning to get into the grocery business, selling lunch meats, glazes, jerky and summer sausage.

(By the way, for all those so indignant about making English the official language of these United States, by cracky, you have to stop saying "jerky" now to describe your inedible dried-meat-that-tastes-like-leather.  The word "jerky" comes from the Spanish "charqui," meaning burned meat, so you are forbidden to say that anymore, capiche?)

So, the big cheese wheels  have decided that you and I are so dumb that we wouldn't know the difference between Cracker Barrel cheese and Cracker Barrel Sliced Liverwurst.

Cracker Barrel Cheese came into being in 1955; the restaurant chain started in 1969.  I have been an avid consumer of the former since I was just a little sharp cheddar, and have dined sumptuously at the latter since, I guess, the 1980s, when they opened shop around this way.

Maybe I'm unaware, but I have never confused the two entities.  Cheese at the grocery store and the highway-side restaurant with the great breakfasts and marvelous grits are two totally different things, clearly.  Have you ever thought they were one and the same?

Here's my idea:  have the lawyers from both sides meet up at a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store halfway between the two corporate offices.  As soon as everyone tucks into a nice Momma's Pancake breakfast (above) all this wrangling and feuding will seem like it was a long, long time ago!