I just had to go back to France this summer. My French was getting as bad as George W. Bush's English.
And I have returned to my homeland grateful that the most powerful nation in the world can protect me ... from cheese.
For a lacto-vegetarian like me, France is sacred ground -- terroir sacre/. French towns are as proud of their produce, their wines, their local cheeses, as West Texas burgs are of their high school football teams, and I love football almost as much as I love cheese.
And yet, to try to bring back a taste of my travels in the form of anything but a photograph of these delights -- a morsel of bleu d'Auvergne, Reblochon, Fougerus, my mouth waters just writing the names -- is to break U.S. law. Many of these remarkable cheeses are not pasteurized or, if they are, they have not been aged the requisite 60 days.
That makes them, unlike semi-automatic assault weapons, illegal in the United States.
I gave serious thought to brazening it out and smuggling some hot Epoisse through Customs, but what if the cheese-sniffing beagles sussed me out and pinned me to the ground and ferreted out my contraband fromage? I could have borne the prospect of being sent to cheese jail -- if Judy Miller can tough it out, so can I -- but they would have thrown away the cheese that I had sacrificed my freedom to keep, so what was the point?
I considered being up-front, declaring it on my Customs form -- ''French cheese.'' I'd even started to draft my own Cheese Liability Waiver form, along the lines of, ``If I [choose one] get sick/get fat/die from eating [fill in the blank] foreign cheese while I am in and under the jurisdiction of the government of the United States, I absolve said government of any responsibility for my [choose one] illness/weight gain/death.'' But ours is a whimsy-deficient bureaucracy -- aren't they all? -- so I gave up on that, too.
The man who invented the process of pasteurization was a Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, but no country has taken to it like the U.S. We like to pasteurize everything. I suspect we pasteurize toothpaste. Something unpasteurized must surely be foul. Germy. Foreign.
The cheese protectionism reminds me of the bogus dismay expressed in certain rightish quarters of Congress that get handsome contributions from U.S. pharmaceutical companies. When elderly Americans hoof it to Canada for their prescription drugs, you'd think from the pols' reaction that they were buying black-tar heroin from southeast Asia: my God, all those unsanitary, substandard Canadian drug companies. I must have missed the epidemic of dead Canadians, felled by their own filthy prescription drugs, just as I must have missed the accounts of thousands of Frenchmen, killed by their own unpasteurized cheeses.
I grew up in the Midwest. I was 16 before I knew there were cheeses that weren't dyed orange and stored alongside the cans of tomato soup. I am still a devotee of Velveeta grilled ``cheese'' sandwiches though I must in all honesty put the c-word in quotes. Is it Velveeta lobbyists working round the clock to keep out the French competition? Say it ain't so.
The numbers in the quote vary, but Charles de Gaulle said famously, ``How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?'' Poor Dubya -- he's having a hard time handling a country that he must think should have only one kind: 'Merican.