Colin McEnroe Show: A Salute To Cheese

The cultural theorist and marketing guru Clotaire Rapaille once told PBS that Americans think of cheese as dead. They want it dead. They want it wrapped in plastic, like a body bag, and stuffed in a refrigerator, like a morgue. The French, he said, think of their cheese as a living thing. You leave it out, let it age. You don't wrap it in plastic and put it in the fridge any more than you would do that to your cat. You smell, you touch, you poke.

Americans now eat 33 pounds of cheese a year, most of it dead and pushed at us by an alliance of corporations and government looking for ways to shove more calories at us.

We eat three times as much cheese as we did in 1970, but most of it is food we barely pay attention to. Today, we look at specialty cheese, the kind you actually pick out and savor in small amounts. Cheese -- more like a pet than a snack.

Today's episode was produced by Sarah Miner.