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Talking Cheese

 Beautiful and funny comparison of American and French cheese and what that means for marketing cheese in America:

..in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don't want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that's where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.

In contrast, he says of the French:

..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. 

A relatively simple idea but with such a myriad of consequences. Reading this essay made me think of other things like cheese where cultures are similar at the surface but really far apart when you dig a bit deeper. Cheese is not cheese dead or alive. It is inherently different and signals very different cultural values and can be an explainer for much larger divergences. 

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