So I went to a café with some new friends to get lunch. I was really impressed by the fact that even in the most touristy part of Bordeaux I could get a decent meal for only 8 euro. I got “un sandwiche jambon” which is a ham sandwich. It came with grilled bread and curly little endive, which was very nice. I lifted this perfectly toasted morsel to my mouth, ignoring the chicly dressed French businessmen and the rustle of the Plane trees, and dove right into what I expected to be French splendor.
Suddenly, I was shocked back into reality. Did I just bite into a cheese flavored Yankee Candle? I looked at the sandwich to find –quel l’horreur- a bright orange piece of American cheese style cheese laughing at me! Okay, maybe it wasn’t laughing, but while I expected cheese that Dean and DeLuca’s would sell for $45 a pound or maybe something made by monks in the Pyrenees through hours of careful cheese study and trying not touching themselves, all I found was a Kraft single.
At first I thought that maybe they were catering to the American tourists by offering me cheese that had in fact never been anywhere near a cow, but then I realized something that transcended my effete anger: the French are real people. While I love my stinky cheese, if at every meal I had to eat something that tasted like a reject demo of penicillin, I would maybe want something safe, simple and bland. After all, artisan French cheese is only special if it is balanced out against something that tastes like an effective patch for dry wall, right?
Frankly, it made the Camembert and blue cheese at dinner taste even more delicious. So what if American cheese, or its French incarnation, is idiotic? Some times you’ve got to watch a little Fox News to appreciate The Economist and sometimes you can find satisfaction in a cheese whose color is found nowhere in nature.
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