Blue cheese asks people to eat a food while looking straight at the mould that made it, and that is more or less the whole argument. The veining is deliberate. Aged curds are pierced so that air can reach the inside, and Penicillium roqueforti then grows along the tunnels that opens up. As it works, the mould breaks fats down into methyl ketones, the compounds behind the sharp smell and the flavour that keeps going after you have swallowed. So the cheese is manufactured to produce precisely the signals people are otherwise taught to avoid: visible mould, a strong aroma, a wet crumbling texture. One eater reads those as depth, another reads them as spoilage, and both are weighing the same evidence. That helps explain the unusual shape of the result. Most disliked foods have a wide indifferent middle. Blue cheese barely has one: YouGov's July 2025 survey put 39% at love or like and 39% at dislike or hate, with only 18% neutral. It is a rare food with almost no fence to sit on.