{"id":24691,"date":"2014-03-16T10:05:49","date_gmt":"2014-03-16T14:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24691"},"modified":"2018-01-11T16:18:08","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T21:18:08","slug":"qotd-american-cheese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/16\/qotd-american-cheese\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: American &#8220;cheese&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Everyone thinks <em>America Alone<\/em> is about Islam and demography, but in fact it has a whole section in it on cheese, called &#8220;The Pasteurization is Prologue&#8221;. Page 181:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>I&#8217;ve never subscribed to that whole &#8220;cheese-eating surrender-monkey&#8221; sneer promoted by my <strong>National Review<\/strong> colleague Jonah Goldberg. As a neocon warmonger, I yield to no one in my contempt for the French, but, that said, cheese-wise I feel they have the edge.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>When I&#8217;m at the lunch counter in America and I order a cheeseburger and the waitress says, &#8220;American, Swiss or Cheddar?&#8221; I can&#8217;t tell the difference. They all taste of nothing. The only difference is that the slice of alleged Swiss is full of holes, so you&#8217;re getting less nothing for your buck. Then again, the holes also taste of nothing, and they&#8217;re less fattening. But, either way, cheese is not the battleground on which to demonstrate the superiority of the American way.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most of the American cheeses bearing European names are bland rubbery eunuch versions of the real thing. I wouldn&#8217;t mind if this were merely the market at work, but it&#8217;s not. It&#8217;s the result of Big Government, of the Brieatollahs at the United States Department of Agriculture:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>In America, unpasteurized un-aged raw cheese that would be standard in any Continental <strong>fromagerie<\/strong> is banned. Americans, so zealous in defense of their liberties when it comes to guns, are happy to roll over for the nanny state when it comes to the cheese board&#8230; The French may be surrender monkeys on the battlefield, but they don&#8217;t throw their hands up and flee in terror just because the Brie&#8217;s a bit ripe. It&#8217;s the Americans who are the cheese-surrendering eating-monkeys &mdash; who insist, oh, no, the only way to deal with this sliver of Roquefort is to set up a rigorous ongoing Hans Blix-type inspections regime.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m not exaggerating about that. Nothing gets past their eyes, and everything gets pasteurized. That&#8217;s why American &#8220;cheesemakers&#8221; have to keep putting stuff into the &#8220;cheddar&#8221; &mdash; sun-dried tomatoes, red peppers, chocolate chips &mdash; to give it some taste, because the cheese itself has none. And, if you try to bring in anything that does taste of something, the US Government&#8217;s Brie Team Six seizes it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The US fate of the bright-orange, mild-tasting French cheese has been in jeopardy for months and the Food and Drug Administration has blocked all further imports.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Why? Because US regulators determined the cantaloupe-like rind of the cheese was covered with too many cheese mites, even though the tiny bugs give <strong>mimolette<\/strong> its unique flavor.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>No formal ban has been put in place, but 1.5 tonnes (3,300 pounds) of cheese were blocked from being imported, and nothing is going through US customs.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8220;No formal ban has been put in place&#8221; &mdash; because that would involve legislators passing laws in a legislature and whatnot. So they just banned it anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Mark Steyn, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.steynonline.com\/6168\/live-brie-or-die\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Live Brie or Die!&#8221; <em>SteynOnline.com<\/em><\/a>, 2014-03-13<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone thinks America Alone is about Islam and demography, but in fact it has a whole section in it on cheese, called &#8220;The Pasteurization is Prologue&#8221;. Page 181: I&#8217;ve never subscribed to that whole &#8220;cheese-eating surrender-monkey&#8221; sneer promoted by my National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg. As a neocon warmonger, I yield to no one in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,62,74,1117,66,57,41,13],"tags":[244,661],"class_list":["post-24691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-europe","category-food","category-france","category-health-science","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-publichealth","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6qf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24691"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24692,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24691\/revisions\/24692"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}