Hacker News Reader

Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

I dunno. Sample size may have something to do with this. I live in a rural section of the US now, but spent a year living in Eastern provincial France and the difference in the cheese case makes me cry when I think about it.

Americans stock their shelves with "swiss" "american" "jack" and "cheddar" with almost all of them being made in about a week in cheese factory somewhere.

Contrast that with having TWO versions of Cantal, one of the blander AOC cheeses, in every cheese case we encountered in France. To say nothing of blues I'd never heard of, and small batch regional cheeses in many supermarchés.

It's all hearsay and conjecture, really, but I think the outsized influence of American chefs is just due to TV culture which is pervasive and consistently unfortunate.

View on HN

I feel sorry for you, but in my small-town new england co-op, we have easily more than a hundred cheeses available, including many local cheeses that you can't get in Europe at any price, and which compare favorably with the best I've had anywhere outside of the northeast.

Rural America has a great food culture here in many areas; it's not just chefs on the TV.

Every contemporary grocery store I've been to in the Northeast US has an artisanal cheese section... And I don't even live in a big city. It's not mixed in the with the "normal" cheeses though. My grocery store makes mozzarella in house too.

Yeah, most of the grocery stores in my corner of Maine have an artisanal cheese section too. But they wrap them all in plastic wrap and the inventory doesn't turn over so it all tastes like crap.

Plus, if you look at the labels, half of the cheeses that are presented as artisanal are actually made by a cheese factory in southern Wisconsin.

All that said, there are a number of folks making brilliant local cheeses in Vermont and Upstate NY, but I find those at the boutique cheese store on the coast, and even their employees often don't know anything about what they're selling. Not sure who's fault that is though.

Either way, I miss France and not just for the cheese. Gastronomically it was simply easier to find high quality produce and AOC protected regional delicacies. And that's not saying they don't have crap too (oh, I remember Lidl), but there was a sense of cultural pride around certain foods that is simply absent in the US outside of hipsters in Vermont and California (which I am mostly likely a part of).

Eh, there's more to food than cheese. Some of my favorite cuisines don't use it at all. The only times I've appreciated a large cheese selection is when I've lived where it was impossible to get milk with lactose included. Now that I'm back in rural USA real milk is easily available so I really don't miss the dozens of cheeses.

Fake news

Haha wut?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com