Today I found myself at Formaggio Kitchen, a specialty food store in North Cambridge, staring—with the unrequited epicuriosity normally reserved for glossy food pornography—at fifty dollar bottles of olive oil (750ml), bizarre varieties of wild mushrooms, organic kumquats, yucca root, and of course the cheeses.

The cheeses are great because you know exactly what to do with them. They do not require sisyphean knife wrangling or the resurrection of lost North African tribal recipes, buried for thousands of years beneath match books, scotch tape rolls, dish towels, toothpicks, and (of course) dirt, all of which have configured themselves into an Indiana Jones-style quagmire in the drawer by the sink.

The cheese case at Formaggio Kitchen has a bumper sticker on the side that reads, “Life’s too short to eat supermarket cheeses.” They sell a hundred or so cheeses, from small sculpted goat cheese pyramids to handmade farmhouse cheddar to blue cheeses that aren’t blue. It’s a sight to see, and beyond that, you can taste any of them on the spot. Sometimes a bit of wine is served alongside the cheese, accompanied a dozen or so upper-middle class Cambridge lushes.

It’s certainly a guilty pleasure. I only go every few months. Everything seems overpriced—everything is overpriced—yet I can convince myself that perhaps it’ll be worth it. I wonder if such a high price makes me hesitant to regret a purchase, but needless to say I never have. So I bought a half pound of salami, a wedge of Brie that felt, through the cellophane, like the supple breast of a nubile bovine, and a bottle of red wine (“the perfect Super Bowl wine,” I’m told by someone who looks like a Harvard professor). I leave, a weight lifted from my wallet, wondering how I will conceal the bovine from my roommate.