What is it with GF options and cheese? Back when I used to have to avoid dietary pressor amines like tyramine (which any aged cheese is potentially heaving with, though non-aged cheeses like mozzarella and cream cheese are okay) in addition to avoiding gluten and excessive sugar, my local chain coffee shop served precisely two gluten-free food options: brownie, or cheese and ham panini. I suppose I could've had cold panini and picked the cheese off, but I also happen to bloody loathe cheese and the rancid taint of it lingering on anything it's touched. And at that price, anything I've paid for, I want to sodding well eat, at the appropriate temperature too.
I know cheese is something many consider a no-brainer flavour booster, which adds textures many people enjoy as well as richness and umami, while improving satiety and, in the case of a toasted sandwich, gluing things together a bit. But not only do some people have to avoid cheese for medical reasons (like I used to) or choose to avoid it for health/ethical/religious reasons, from what I've seen IRL and online there are more people who actively dislike aged cheese than seems to be commonly acknowledged. I frequently come across others like me, who dislike aged/matured cheese (though many who dislike it are, like me, okay with un-aged cheeses like mozzarella, halloumi, cream cheese or cottage cheese, because they don't have that decomposed, bacterial flavour that tells my body to violently reject it as dangerous).
I know that if you only sell one GF sandwich, then whatever you pick, someone's going to have a problem with it. But please, for the love of cheese-dodgers, at least make it a different bloody thing in different places!
You could do a single GF sandwich option that's slathered with copious mayonnaise, to annoy GF mayo-haters plus vegans and those with egg allergies. Or only one with plain ham and butter to irritate GF veggies, vegans, milk allergy sufferers, people who prefer complicated sandwiches, and some religious people. Or only one with houmous and red pepper, to irk the GF legume- or sesame-allergic, people with a religious objection to garlic, and those who believe sandwiches should ideally be less soggy and unappealing than the sponge left at the bottom of the kitchen sink when the scummy water's been drained.
Hm. That was a longer rant than I intended. I would never whinge this much normally; it must've been building up and got released here… 😅
We're meant to be glad we're being catered to at all, I think. People generally seem to be allowed one dietary need, preference, or violent dislike before being considered difficult, and we've already used ours up on the gluten.
I just really don't like aged cheese. It's one tiny bloody food category, but so hard to avoid, especially when already restricted by coeliac disease. I wish we didn't have this cultural norm of treating cheese as a totally innocuous, unarguably delicious ingredient that unquestionably improves anything it's added to, something the ubiquity of which no reasonable person could possibly object to.