The Cheese Thing

So what's with the cheese?  I mean, cheese is intended to go on TOP of things like pizza, burgers, or lasagna.  You might dip nachos in it if you're feeling like more than the usual salsa dip. You could grill it in a sandwich or spread it on a bagel.  I used to consider myself a bit of a cheese snob because I eschewed the standard fluorescent-orange cheddar for the "fancy" natural-colored white sharp cheddar.   

What about the REAL cheese snobs?  How can the French consider that cheese is sufficiently interesting, in itself, to warrant a course of its own during a meal?  That last is a stereotype that is mostly true.  Most restaurants and families at home offer cheese before desert.  Much is made over the number of different cheeses in France, with numbers anywhere from dozens to thousands depending on how you do the counting.  How can we even imagine that kind of variety when most of the cheese we encounter is either mozzarella, cheddar, or, well, SQUARE?   

 I certainly wasn't prepared, but I can now testify that there is, indeed, an incredible variety; some if it is rather pungent, and while most is delicious, some varieties are an acquired taste.  Roquefort in particular has as strong a scent as its reputation suggests.  Mind you, many French people don't like it.  That or they say, "Well you don't eat it ALONE!  It's best with bread, butter and red wine."  Taste in cheese is very personal, everyone has their favorites, and not liking one variety is not a shameful or unpatriotic thing.  My wife likens it to how Americans  have their favorite brands and flavors of chips out of the dozens of varieties available.  

What seems silly to us is so only because we don't have such a wide variety available to choose from. It is genuinely silly to obsess about cheese in a world where you have so little, but an abundance of difference opens up the possibility of appreciating those differences.  

The Myth of the Rude Frenchman

I grew up with the typical 'Pepe le Pew' stereotypes of the French that are so common in the US.  I thought all Frenchmen were rude and arrogant, wore berets and horizontally striped shirts, had thin mustaches, ate smelly cheese and carried around baguettes of bread.  I never really believed any of that was true, but I had no other images to replace them with.  Hence:

Of all these, the only ones that turned out to be true were the bits about the cheese and the bread.  I'll discuss all of them eventually, but the worst are the first two.   They're mentioned in films, TV, books, etc., always with an air of certainty to it, as though 
it were a cultural trait as ubiquitus as the British tendancy to politeness and tea-drinking.   It's so common that I hear it from the French themselves.   Many French people have bemoaned to me the rudeness of their own countrymen,  all the while being perfectly polite and personable to me.  Now, either they stop being nice when I turn my back as part of some giant conspiracy of 'let's mess with the American by being nice to him, or the stereotype is simply, flat-out wrong.  

Where did this impression come from? After all, stereotypes like this aren't formed overnight, and by only a few people. How could all  American tourists who have visited for the last half century or so be so wrong?  

When people visit France , they dont really visit FRANCE, they visit Paris.    Now, Parisians have a reputation in France much like New Yorkers in the US.  It's a big city, and people generally have a tendancy to be a bit taciturn with strangers.   Not only that, but when you are a tourist, your primary form of contact with REAL parisians is in the subway.  It's my personnel experience that the Paris Metro at rush hour can make even affable Oklahomans capable of growling at strangers, but it's not a permanent effect.

The French people I have met have been unfailingly polite, almost to a fault.  Perhaps that's part of the problem, because that politeness results in greater formality.  This is more true of the older generations that of young people, but on average, the French do have a tendency towards formality.  Sometimes it could be perceived as arrogance,  because that politeness can seem overly formal. In the US, formality can come across as arrogance because we tend to equate familiarity with friendliness. This is not a failing on our part any more than formality is a failing for the French!  But we must be careful to recognize that in other cultures, too much familiarity  can be taken for a lack of respect.  

Ironically, we tend to think of the Frenh as arrogant because they are  mcuh more formal than we are and they tend to think US arrogant for EXACTLY THE SAME REASON!