Trade restrictions don’t seem to have done much to reduce the selection available at Trader Joe’s. There’s a substantial variety of good domestic cheeses, but the range is limited compared to that of the European exports. One might conjecture that the American market for good cheese is small enough to be nearly satisfied by inexpensive imports, in contrast to the wine market. I see more vineyard acreage driving through either California’s Central Valley or the Salinas valley than riding a train through Bordeaux or Tuscany.

Speaking of which, I miss living across the street from a Brennan’s Market as much as anything.

Fun fact of questionable utility: Madison gets 3,168 hits for cheese, and Wisconsin’s pushing 3,000,000, nearly half as many hits as all of France.

What Tom Hurka said. Protected or otherwise, the stuff is excellent—in a recent comparison tasting it bested similar French cheeses in five of six cases. Even their (aged) cheddar is top notch.

As for Americans being able to afford to purchase good cheese – I spent a uni summer in Boston in the USA as a student on one of those temporary work visas and suffered from being unable to get decent cheese. The “good stuff” (within my price range) tasted worse than NZ’s $5 for 1 kg Valumetric cheese. Of course things may have improved since then – they could hardly have gotten worse.

That’s a worthwhile question. I have nostalgic moments when I remember the dozens of local cheeses being sold out of a van at a small-town French market, but I wouldn’t really want them sold in the US, even in the local hippie-grocer alongside the growing range of American-made varieties. Other cheeses do rely upon a global market, for better or worse, which is why they value the protection of AOC.

Still, Clothaire Rapaille is basically correct on how Americans regard cheese, and it’ll take a big top-and-bottom cultural shift towards food and agriculture to change that, which extends to the criminalisation of small-scale dairies by the FDA.

And just to clarify my own post: by “American cheese” I did not mean “cheese made in America.” I meant the ubiquitous orange processed meets-the-legal-definition-of-cheese cheese-like substance known as American cheese. I do love a Vermont cheddar so old that it is practically crystallized.