5 ms·
Reminds me of a book I read more than a decade ago. The Culture Code. By Clotaire Rapaille. He argued that 'the French Code for cheese is ALIVE. The American Co
by leobg 3y ago
Reminds me of a book I read more than a decade ago. The Culture Code. By Clotaire Rapaille. He argued that 'the French Code for cheese is ALIVE. The American Code for cheese, on the other hand, is DEAD.'
I don’t have the book handy, but here is a quote from the web:
> I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn't understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that's why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don't put your cat in the refrigerator. It's the same; it's alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese.
- carabiner 3y agoYes, the US FDA has tight restrictions on unpasteurized milk and cheeses, and France does not. Some French cheeses are straight up illegal in the US because they're raw and not aged long enough i.e. reblochon.
- jandrese 3y agoIf you are wondering, yes, every year a handful of French people get hospitalized from eating bad cheese. Usually E. Coli contamination.
- psunavy03 3y ago. . . which is horrible. I wouldn't wish E. coli on my worst enemy.
- umvi 3y agoI can't tell if this is satire or not since every healthy person has probably trillions of e coli in their gut.
- ceejayoz 3y agoIs this satire? They’re clearly not talking about the benign strains.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoThe strains in your gut aren't really benign, they're just isolated to your gut. If you exposed someone to those strains by say not washing your hands before cooking, it would not be fine. I agree GP is being silly though.
- pazimzadeh 3y agoNot really. Anyway the genome of E. coli is extremely diverse, there is not really such a thing as "E. coli." And strain that colonizes your gut may not colonize someone else's, or cause problems. But most living things can be opportunistic e.g. if your immune system is compromised.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoI stand corrected.
- pazimzadeh 3y agoWell, you're not totally wrong since the body does have several layers of defense to keep the bacteria in the intestine, and bad things happen when they break down: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0803124105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0803124105 On the other hand the immune system selects for beneficial bacteria, which take up space and nutrients so that really harmful ones can't colonize: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/nri3535 https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/nri3535; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05141-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05141-x
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoThe E. coli strains of concern are the so-called enterotoxic (or enterotoxigenic) E. coli and the Shiga-toxin producing strains. Those are not commonly found in peoples' guts and when they are, they cause... trouble. Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is a type of Escherichia coli and one of the leading bacterial causes of diarrhea in the developing world,[1] as well as the most common cause of travelers' diarrhea.[2] Insufficient data exists, but conservative estimates suggest that each year, about 157,000 deaths occur, mostly in children, from ETEC.[3][4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterotoxigenic_Escherichia_coli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterotoxigenic_Escherichia_co... The most common sources for Shiga toxin are the bacteria S. dysenteriae and some serotypes of Escherichia coli (STEC), which includes serotypes O157:H7, and O104:H4.[4][5] Symptoms of Shiga toxin ingestion include abdominal pain as well as watery diarrhea. Severe life-threatening cases are characterized by hemorrhagic colitis (HC).[15] The toxin is associated with hemolytic-uremic syndrome. In contrast, Shigella species may also produce shigella enterotoxins, which are the cause of dysentery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiga_toxin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiga_toxin
- kazinator 3y agoThat only says you don't have such a bad worst enemy.
- kergonath 3y agoCompared to things like listeria or salmonella? Surely, you’re joking. E. coli is benign in most cases. For perspective, in France (since we’re talking about French cheese), the orders of magnitude are hundreds of deaths each year from salmonella, tens from listeria (with a death rate of ~20% for its invasive form), and even fewer from E. coli. Except in a tiny number of cases it is unpleasant but short and not threatening (remember to drink a lot, though, the most dangerous effect is dehydration).
- littlestymaar 3y agoMostly children and elderly people though, and raw cheese isn't the lead cause for such contamination, despite regulation processed food is quite high as well (with the record in recent years going to … Nestlé, who else. /r/fucknestle)
- ta988 3y agoA lot more in the US from Romaine lettuce of meats.
- ajmurmann 3y agoI'm so glad the US government is keeping us safe from our own culinary decisions.
- tyjen 3y agoUS government and politicians would not care if not for the greed of large food corporations lobbying for absurd restrictions that only large corporate farms can economically afford to follow. This effectively pushes small farms out of business and they eat gobble up the market share. On top of this, only about 15 cents of every dollar goes back to farmers, the remaining amount pays for processing and marketing. The US food system is insane and WAY overpriced, due in large part to corporate greed.
- foobarian 3y agoAh, I had reblochon in a tartiflette once. Made the whole house smell like feet :-)
- carabiner 3y agoYeah I didn't really get the appeal of reblochon for that reason. Really liked Brie de meaux though. Other cheeses that have "barnyard" aroma (manure) have an appeal that inscrutable to me.
- gavin_gee 3y ago[flagged]
- tnecniv 3y agoKind of funny given the guy who invented pasteurization
- xwolfi 3y agoIm French, and when I was 16, I went to New York and was traumatized by the border checks on both ends opening all my luggages in front of everyone (and every other French person had to do it) to make sure I wasnt carrying frigging supermarket cheese nobody cares about. They specifically check French people for these crimes, I was told, because we seem not to realize we're threatening the US with our crappy Camemberts.
- albert180 3y agoIf you tried the abomination sold in German Supermarkets as "Camembert" you would suddenly highly appreciate your "crappy" Camembert
- kazinator 3y agoYou should take back that statue.
- fuzztester 3y agoha ha, good one. I wonder how many others got the reference.
- d-lisp 3y agoI only buy old cheese because it is more intense. It is rather hard to perform the "affinage" of the cheese without a controlled environment (Roquefort is "affiné" in natural caves in which you have several exits that you can open or close depending on the temperature and hygrometry of the caves, that's part of the AOP). I never got sick eating cheese, but that's actually possible Salmonella, Listeria, E.Coli, Tick-borne encephalitis virus (and you could die from it, in rare occasions).
- rvba 3y agoWhoa tick-borne encephalitis virus can be found in goat cheese?
- GuB-42 3y agoAs a french, and also cheese lover. Yes, cheese is absolutely alive. And one thing I love about "real" cheese is variation. Depending on the season, conditions,... and chance, you get cheese that is different. Not always great, sometimes I am disappointed, but there are other occasions where the result is so good that it is well worth the occasional disappointment. Industrial cheese is boring, it is never bad, but it is never good either. As for being sick. I never got sick with cheese, despite eating cheese on a daily basis. And I have eaten cheese that is way after its "use by" date, cheese with the "wrong" mold, cheese strong enough to numb the tongue after eating a tip of a knife worth, cheese I forgot until smell alerted me of its presence,... and all that raw milk. I didn't try the kind with maggots yet though. I know that cheese borne diseases exist, but overall, for how alive it is, cheese is surprisingly safe. In fact, that's the big idea with cheese. It is full of bacteria and molds that we know are safe, and these tend to outcompete the pathogenic ones.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoThat's the problem with standardized and sanitization of food. By rejecting irregularities, smell, dirt, we create souless food.
- refurb 3y agoI think we need a “no true cheese” fallacy. I love the underlying tone to this. The French are a civilized people who care about the age of their cheese. While the country bumpkin Americans lack the sophistication and knowledge of cheese age. I mean, really?
- hnfong 3y agoI'm Asian, so I don't have a stake in this Euro-American "conflict" personally. What I can tell you is that I religiously avoid cheeses made in USA, because they generally taste horrible. Cheeses from continental Europe are generally fine.
- numpad0 3y agoI think it's worthy of a note that Europe is extremely dry and cold as inside of a refrigerator. Someone in Europe might not keep cheese artificially refrigerated, but nor would one keep it in a shower room.
- whatshisface 3y agoEurope spans 37 degrees latitude and has a lot of climactic diversity. It's not "extremely dry and cold, like the inside of a refrigerator." Countries in the north temperate zone have four seasons.
- geon 3y agoYeah. Even here in Sweden where I had -17 C the other day, the summers can be pretty warm. Outdoors is "refrigerator" temperatures only in perhaps March-May and September-October. But that still doesn't make sense, since we usually keep cheese indoors, where it is is nice and comfortable.
- numpad0 3y ago-17C is 27C lower than what we have over here! We're definitely not in agreement with definition of "pretty warm" in absolute term. Stockholm had one day exceeding 30C throughout 2023, here we had entire August above that. 89 days total above 30C in the capital, in fact. Definition of warm or cool can't be the same with this kind of difference - and I'd imagine similar could be said about the US, they have southerly regions where hot and wet indoor ambient atmosphere can't be cheese-safe most of the time. You guys are having it easy when it comes to food safety.
- whatshisface 3y agoThe US south is all air-conditioned, nobody could tolerate the natural indoor temperatures in houses built in modern styles.
- kazinator 3y agoWell over 10 years ago, I went through a phase when I was into ripening cheese. I'd get a round of brie and put it into the bookshelf in my cubicle at work, for weeks. Very tasty. One time I had a mild fever that I'm sure was from eating the stuff, but recovered overnight.