HOMAGE TO THE FROMAGE
By Andrea Girardin
Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun
September 26, 2008 – 12:00am
NY
The French like to say that "a meal without cheese is like a beautiful
woman with only one eye." Cyclops phobia aside, I’ve never said no
to the fromage. Ever. Ask the jeans I wore in Paris.
James Joyce, on the other hand, called cheese the "corpse of milk."
No offense, Jimbo, but it’s so much more than that.
Milk does not become cheese to die. Milk becomes cheese to transcend,
well, everything.
Cheese ferments at the delicate intersection of culture and
politics. It is essentially the culinary equivalent of Jesus.
It has long staved off famines and soothed weary travelers. In modern
times, legions of housewives, pizzerias, and Mexican restaurants
everywhere have melted it into comfort food sainthood. Devout cults
have formed in some countries to worship the various incarnations of
the dairy nectar.
It has been, across time and place, the great unifier and divider.
Andrew Jackson, the 7th President of the United States, was famously
sent a 1,400-pound wheel of cheese by a New York dairy farmer in
1835. He left it to age in the White House entrance hall for two years
(the smell must have been delightful). Jackson then held an open party
and invited the public to come and eat this cheese. It was gone in
a mere two hours.
Andy Jackson understood that cheese was a vehicle by which politicians
could reach the people. He had 1,400 pounds of cheese and a reputation
to uphold. They were hungry. It all worked out.
Fast-forward a century to June 1940. Winston Churchill was certain
that France would be on the winning side of the war because "a country
producing almost 360 types of cheese cannot die."
His old buddy Charles De Gaulle, in his later attempts to rein in
a distinctly vivacious Fifth Republic, expressed his exasperation,
asking how one "could be expected to govern a country that has 246
kinds of cheese."
They weren’t exactly strong on the math, but they were on to
something. Cheese is to France as money is to Wall Street. The two are
inextricably and often frustratingly linked in their roller coaster
ride across history.
In 2008, France produces more than 1,000 distinct varieties of
cheese and is the world’s largest cheese exporter. The EU’s Common
Agricultural Policy covers many French cheeses through a Protected
Designation of Origin, which means that traditional specialties are
immune for all of bureaucratic perpetuity.
In this cocoon of legislative security, the French population consumes
more cheese per capita than any other nation on Earth (except Greece,
their feta be damned). And, as attested by the number of gorgeous
two-eyed Parisian women, every meal ends with the tangy hardness of
a Comté, the redolent stench of a ripe Pont-l’Ã~Ivêque, the buttery
cream of a Brie-de-Meaux, or the nuttiness of a Tomme de Savoie.
To the French, anything pasteurized and packaged in plastic represents
a callous affront to the collective psyche of the nation.
I discovered the hard way that even REFRIGIRATION proves scandalous.
I had a colleague in Marseille (let’s call her Martine) who loved to
impart her French ways upon my heathen North American soul. She used to
invite me to her apartment for elaborate Sunday eating marathons. One
week, I went into her kitchen before the 17th course and noticed the
unmistakable stench of Brie emanating from under a clear plastic case
on the counter. I made the mistake of asking her why she didn’t put
her cheese in the fridge.
"But Andréa, you never put zee fromage in zee fridge! You kill zee
cheese! KILL! It must ripen and evolve like all living zhings!"
To this day, Martine refuses to believe that I would commit the crime
of refrigeration.
For her and her people, the Kraft Single goes beyond ultimate
insult. It is the stuff of freaky science fiction.
Yet the nation that birthed the Kraft Single is just as deeply marked
by le fromage.
The United States ranks as the world’s foremost cheese producer. Total
output was a whopping 9.67 billion pounds in 2007.
That says as much about America as Brie does about France.
Even more telling is cheese’s role as the American wedge issue par
excellence.
In a now-famous 2007 campaign stop, Arugula Obama was born in Iowa
causing, as we say in Québec, "a storm in a water glass." Thus, while
visiting Philadelphia this April, he was viciously criticized for his
elitist sampling of artisanal goat cheese and Spanish ham that retailed
at $100 per pound and his failure to chow down a Philly cheesesteak.
And for extra-sharp distinction, while Obama made stellar photo-op
stops in the Middle East on July 23rd, the media caught up with John
McCain in a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He held a press
conference about his misstatements on the troop surge — in front of
an aisle of hanging processed cheese.
Meanwhile, during some free Sargento airtime in America, cheese rocked
its culinary Jesus role on the other side of the world. On May 14th,
a giant round of "Caucasian cheese" was unveiled in Armenia by a
group of Turks and Armenians. They hoped that their "regional peace
cheese" could act as a symbol of their desire to reopen the sealed
Turkish-Armenian border. Then, on September 6th, Turkey’s president
traveled to Armenia, making the first visit by a Turkish leader in
the nations’ complicated history.
Take that, James Joyce.
Andréa Girardin is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She
can be contacted at [email protected]. Raisin d’être appears alternate
Fridays. The Sun thanks Prof. Isaac Kramnick, government for the De
Gaulle reference.
–Boundary_(ID_Lz+oE5lW0XDM7WcCLE4lTw) —