Here's my boring American cheese story.
I remember when I was 6 and I was given what was called "processed cheese". (We were in the Soviet Union so we didn't call it American cheese.) I thought that the name meant that it was made from leftover pieces of normal cheese that had been thrown away and then recycled. After we came to the USA not long after that, pre-sliced American cheese was one of the cheap foods we ate a lot of. It tasted good to us because we were still in the stage where we thought that the variety of groceries available in the USA was marvelous. My grandma still likes it now.