Say cheese
While the EU’s bureaucrats still let you
Prince Charles has done it again, with a passionate defence of weird cheese you never heard of. In a good way.
Obviously, as a highly public figure he’s had lots of practice saying “cheese.” And you may feel that as a hereditary monarch, he’s had lots of practice nibbling Crottin or Pont L’Eveque at fancy functions while the rest of us eat cheese whiz with our thumbs. But the Prince of Wales is not the idle toff of popular mockery.
Remember, he was ridiculed for talking to plants and for organic farming when he led the way, then applauded when it became mainstream. He was also scorned for hating hideous modern architecture but his day will come there too. And now there’s exotic raw milk cheese.
While in Paris for the UN climate change conference, he gave a heartfelt warning against the disappearance of traditional French cheeses due to the “bacteriological correctness” of EU bureaucrats. Dozens of varieties have already vanished and far more are in danger because only a few small producers still make them.
Now you may say you don’t eat Pastugal or Vacherin d’Abondance anyway. Indeed you can’t because they already bit the red tape. Or you may object that those of us not born to royalty don’t get handed Brie de Meaux, Crottin de Chavignol or Bleu d’Auvergne on silver platters. But it would be a far bleaker world in which we could not go and find them for ourselves.
Not all of them, of course. You can’t eat 600 kinds of cheese. But that’s part of the charm of genuine diversity: more craft cheeses than you could taste in a lifetime, each with its own history, local roots and passionate devotees. And while you can’t eat them all, you can eat any of them, by exploring byways rather than supermarket aisles.
Or could have. But that world is fast disappearing, both the cheeses and the byways. And Charles put his finger on the intellectual root of the problem in a way that transcends the tired head- banging partisan categories of most modern discourse.
Ponder his apparently eccentric blast at a “microbe- free, progressive and genetically engineered future” in which, he asks, “what hope is there for the old- fashioned Fourme d’Ambert, the malformed Gruyere de Comte or t he odorous Pont L’Eveque?” This warning cuts like an old- fashioned wire cheese slicer through conventional categories of thought.
I mean, Charles is a passionate environmentalist, so he must be on the left. Except “bacteriological correctness” plays off political correctness and attacks bureaucracy, so he must be on the right. But attacking genetic engineering and praising microbes makes him some unbathed hippie who, um, denounced progressive thought.
There’s the rub. Although “progressive” might be a generally leftwing label, many neo- conservatives and libertarians are equally fanatical about “progress,” about replacing old ways of doing things, and old things, with new and better ones. The way the Internet disrupts traditional social and cultural patterns excites them just as much as stateimposed “social change” excites the left. Neither has room for the genuinely eccentric and different, the hermit or oddball who prefers old “inefficient” craft ways and even punctuates text messages properly.
The centralizing, bureaucratic, process- driven, mathematically standardizing modern temper isn’t left or right. Or rather, as things now stand, it is both. Leftists may be more keen on governments getting everything sorted, labelled and ready for to the future, and rightists more keen on corporations doing it. But look at what they’ve done to our food together.
Processed cheese, fast- food burgers, frozen dinners, sliced bread and so on down the centre of the supermarket, all easy to produce, predict and regulate, both the stuff and the production process, and all devoid of charm. Even abolishing microbes rouses the equal enthusiasm of “leftists” for government health standards and “rightists” for a final Randian conquest of nature.
Both thrill at mass- produced dairy cows scientifically fed and bred, hooked up to machines extracting a tidal wave of milk pasteurized not pasteurized, sold in plastic bags of uniform size and taste in identical supermarkets by identical clerks making identical computerized contributions to national social programs, every bit of it quantified analytically. And just wait for slabs of genetically engineered plasticized “meat” rolling out of factories, nutritionally enriched, imperishable, while increasingly strict regulation puts dirty family farms out of business.
Obviously this Brave New World has no room for malformed Gruyere de Comte or malformed people and precious little that is authentic in any form.
We need a “turquoise” fusion of blue and green into genuinely organic conservatism. Since the Prince of Wales is not free to lead it, let us put down the cheese whiz and ourselves erect a standard to George Washington’s “wise and honest may repair,” proudly displaying some raw milk cheese we can’t even pronounce.
You can’t eat 600 kinds of cheese. But that’s part of the charm of genuine diversity: more options than you could taste in a lifetime, each with its own history, local roots and passionate devotees