Oh please. This attitude is at least 20 years out of date. The US has a number of excellent, world class cheeses which are becoming more and more accessible every day. I can now walk into my local safeway and be confronted with an entire display case full of artisinal, high quality cheese.
True, certain things like raw milk cheese are unavailable but it's certainly not true that US cheeses universally taste like plastic.
And yet countries like France have no problem with people eating unpasteurized cheeses all the time every day. And the cheese there is on a different league than in the US diversity and quality wise ;-).
I have a cheese shop that I go to on a fairly regular basis, and for the life of me I can't remember seeing any cheeses that were not made in the US. Our FDA has a thing for destroying people's lives over raw milk (seriously, they go into full stormtrooper mode, kicking down doors, shoving guns into people's faces), which probably prevents most cheeses from around the world passing customs.
No offense, but as far as I can tell this doesn't even try to respond to the claim that there are great cheeses coming from the US today. It just propagates a largely irrelevant presumption that could be perfectly compatible with what it seems you're trying to disagree with.
> It is impossible to sell raw-milk cheese in the United States.
I've bought plenty of raw mil cheeses (domestic and imported) in the US.
http://www.realrawmilkfacts.com/raw-milk-regulations says:
"In 1987, the FDA mandated pasteurization of all milk and milk products for human consumption, effectively banning the shipment of raw milk in interstate commerce with the exception of cheese made from raw milk, provided the cheese has been aged a minimum of 60 days and is clearly labeled as unpasteurized."
As many cheeses are aged more than 60 days, the ban on "raw-milk cheeses" is basically an urban myth.
Sorry that I was a bit aggressive. Cheese is a Very Important Matter. :)
I noticed "Fancy cheese" (not velveeta) showing up regularly in the 2000s, when I was starting to shop for myself, and as my cheesy experience grew, "good cheese" like the better stinky ones were more available probably 4-5 years later. Now, even in my local supermarket which is considered the "worst" of all the grocery stores in the area, I can get authentic cheeses from a variety of places.
I don't think people's tastes evolved as much as the supply chain for getting these cheeses around has improved much in recent years, making tasty cheese super affordable.
That's one of the things Europeans (anecdotally Germans and French) who work or study in North America complain about. Cheese quality and selection (and price!) here is crap. In fact, food quality here seems to be a notch lower.
It feels absurd to have to keep asking WTF people mean when they arbitrarily say x in y is better than x in the US (and let’s be honest, that’s a sign it’s not, you’re just nostalgic), but what is better about British milk? And I swear if you say fresh off a local farm whole milk is better than the skim milk you bought in Walmart that one time I’m going to stab you... we are comparing apples to apples here, not apples to white water that isn’t what your mom served you as a kid.
US eggs are refrigerated, as are those in some EU countries. It’s actually variations in temperature that cause condensation and lead to salmonella, so your whole “guaranteed salmonella free” thing is, at best, crap... as long as they are consistently warm or consistently cold you’re fine regardless. And none of that has anything to do with the quality or taste.
With cheese you finally hit a point. You want Epoisses and can’t find a decent one. That is a fair complaint, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of anything in the US. I want a good rich, sharp, non-waxy (“crap”) cheddar. I also cannot find that anywhere... I’m in Europe. In the US I could find one in any grocery store I walked into.
This is about variety and availability, NOT quality. I dislike that I can’t find a nice cheddar, but I’m not writing off entire countries or continents as having nothing but crap because of it - the rest of the locals obviously don’t want it enough to keep it in stock, so it’s just going to mold before it gets bought. They have plenty of other good cheeses, just not the one I’m looking for.
What differentiates the US from other countries is that you CAN, absolutely, without any doubt what so ever, find what you’re looking for somewhere. Sure Walmart and Safeway don’t have it, but there is a smaller shop or a gourmet chain that does. That... isn’t quite true elsewhere.
I don't believe it's not doable, but all I've seen of North American supermarkets is 'cheddar-style' processed cheese and similar abominations; is food-buying just different, does anyone wanting half-decent cheese go to a cheesemonger or farmers' market or something?
Slightly off topic now, but I really don't understand how a nation like the US eats so much cheese, yet simply cannot make cheese :/ It's horrible depressing tasteless mush.
I wonder if there's a specific reason you can't get real cheese in the US.
True, certain things like raw milk cheese are unavailable but it's certainly not true that US cheeses universally taste like plastic.
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