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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Was surprised to see in England that “cheddar(s)” us almost synonymous with “cheese”, to the point where it could be the sign hanging over the cheese section in a grocery store.

Is this similar to how “pudding” is used for “dessert”, or is it simply that almost all the cheese will be cheddar anyway?

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To be honest I think that this is a bit of hyperbole. Cheddar is certainly common, and as a simple example there will be at least three and usually four or five different varieties of house-brand cheddar (excluding different packaging and block vs. pre-grated) in any big market but there will be as much pan-European cheeses as well as other English cheese on display. This is London, so take it with an appropriate grain of salt for being both metropolitan and cosmopolitan, but no one I know of uses 'cheddar' to mean cheese in general or at least not in the same way someone from the southern US might refer to Coke as a generic for soda.

> this is a bit of hyperbole

I don't want to imply neither that this is still the case (it was 20 years ago), nor that it happened everywhere (I obviously didn't visit or live in every region of britain at the time, I lived in Glasgow and visited various other parts).

What I'm 100% sure of is that it wasn't the sign for the specific cheddars part of the cheese section in in the store. I made a double take on numerous occasions because the biggest "main" navigation store signs were saying "Bread",...,"Jams", "Cheddars" etc which was the surprising bit for me as a foreigner looking for non-cheddar cheese.

In the cheddars section there were of course all sorts of cheese! Once I started noticing it I started looking for the phenomenon in stores, and it wasn't just one store. Sadly I can't remember if it was just one chain of stores (it's likely).

Where in England was this, as none of the places I've lived do this. Signs would be Cheese or more broadly Dairy. Not that we don't have a lot of cheddar..

This was in several places including West Midlands but also other places in Britain such as Glasgow. Can’t remember which stores had ”Cheddars” over (all) the cheese, but might have been Marks & Spencer’s. This was 20 years ago, so has likely changed since.

I mean that just doesn't like something that Marks and Spencers (of all places!) would do. They sell cheese from named small farms and things and have done for the last 20 years at least.

Yes, again I’m not sure. Could have been Sainsbury’s or Tesco - I’m more trying to remember the colors of the signs and the shops I used to visit than anything else.

It's common in large European stores to relegate cheeses to their own sections. While for most anglos, cheddar is synonymous with cheese, this is not the case across the channel.

> While for most anglos, cheddar is synonymous with cheese

The anglos across the channel have literally hundreds of different types of regional cheese. Cheddar is not synonymous with cheese here.

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