A pedestrian palate meets the elegance of le fromage

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© St. Petersburg Times
published October 7, 2002

Without shame, I report to you being recently in France.

Many important things could be related about this experience, such as an in-depth discussion of the attitude of the French toward our foreign policy, or the pervasive influence of U.S. popular culture. Even a remark or two on the rapid acceptance of the Euro, and the advantages of a society that has no paper currency smaller than a five, might be in order.

There also is a wine thing.

However, let us skip these topics in favor of certain comparative comments about ways in which our American way of life clearly is superior (the quality of our beef, for example, not to mention the cleanliness of our highway rest stops), and also frank self-appraisals as to where the French have the better of us.

Primarily, in this latter regard, I wish to speak of cheese.

Cheese!

I had no idea.

There is a plane of cheese-existence on this Earth that so far transcends the measly, puny, pale, plastic-wrapped, pasteurized blandness of the United States as to be as a full starry universe compared to a 40-watt light bulb.

Until this exposure, my existence had been, shall we say, two-dimensional, planar, even Kraftian.

cheese: a food made from the curds of soured milk pressed together to form a solid that is usually allowed to ripen.

-- Webster's New World College Dictionary

The key words there are "curds," "soured" and "ripen." These words imply the presence of ongoing bacterial and chemical processes that are considered, in the ordinary course of things, to be disgusting.

Not surprisingly, then, being Americans, who do not really want to know that beef comes from cattle, chicken comes from feathery birds, bacon comes from Wilbur and all the other harsh realities of the food supply, we also seek to deny the true nature of cheese.

In fact, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires something utterly dramatic -- we required cheese sold in this nation to be made from pasteurized milk, or else aged well past the point at which Nature intended certain of her cheeses to be consumed. This is to say, we Americans require the killing of many of the biological processes that contribute to the essence of cheesehood.

We deny cheese its fullness. Being bossy, we also are trying to tell the French to do this, too, which is sort of like telling them to knock off the whole beret-and-Eiffel Tower thing.

(There are nannyish Americans, who are certain how other people should live, who will cry out here: "But it's icky, dangerous bacteria! If you are in favor of raw-milk cheese, then you are in favor of people dying of food poisoning! Society must be protected!" To which I reply: More people get sick from mishandled pasteurized cheese than have suffered from this slim chance. Please go eat some raw oysters, or for that matter, smoke a cigar.)

The cheese display in a French market is endless, and contains dozens of cheeses of all variety. Certain cheeses bear a date. This date is not an expiration date. It is the date until which the consumer should wait, so that nature may take its course, and the burgeoning and ripening cheese can reach the perfect grace of its maturity.

Meanwhile, raw-milk, unaged cheese takes its rightful place of honor at the French table. Le fromage is its own course, and can easily replace dessert itself. At the proper moment, the cheese-cart is wheeled to the tableside, and the diner chooses various samples, which are expertly sliced and delivered.

What can be said of the taste of these cheeses? Even the mildest and most polite still is a satisfying journey. At their more adventurous, there is a shock on the tongue -- the evolutionary purpose of our taste buds being to decide, is this a thing to be kept or rejected? -- followed by a rising fullness, a ripeness, a blooming of flavor, which cleanses and becomes transcendent. Life, therefore, can never be the same. I seek reassignment to Europe from our editor-in-chief, who is known here, of course, as le grand fromage.

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

-- DeGaulle

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