For Christmas my cousin Diogenes gave us an assortment of really good cheese, the kind you just don’t buy for yourself when you have a big family. The piece of resistance (as we say in French) was a tiny cylinder of goat cheese called Crottin de Chavignol. My, was it good; creamy, nutty, exhilarating in its goatiness—a true work of art. I kept the little round green label with the adorable goat to remind myself what it is that I truly want when I think of cheese.

Good cheese is made from raw milk —unpasteurized milk. The heat of pasteurization would render the cheese bacteria-free, if bland, but it turns out enzymes in raw-milk cheese will neutralize the bacteria as the cheese ages. Up until now, the US government has allowed the importation and sale of aged (but not fresh) raw-milk cheese. I say “up until now” because there is a movement afoot to ban all raw-milk cheese, on the grounds that even aged cheese can harbor bacteria that present a problem, such as listeria and salmonella. Now, officials admit that they do not have any studies that show that dangerous bacteria are present, or that anyone has been made sick by eating the cheese in question. However, maybe people could get sick, so the thinking is that the cheese ought to be banned.

Ah, my little green goat! Shall I see you again? By the way, Crottin de Chavignol is a funny name. It seems, for those of you who haven’t brushed up on your idiomatic French lately, that “crottin” means, to be polite, “road apple”—i.e. just the sort of little brown round object you might find in the road up there in the goat country in the middle of France. “Road apple of Chavignol”: just a little Gallic humor—what you’d expect when you cross an earthy Frenchman with a little brown cylinder of strong-smelling cheese. Yet, what a cheese! Praised as one of the best of France (and therefore the world), it has the rare quality of being delightfully edible when fresh and staying so through every stage up to complete ripeness. What a glory! How noble, that something so humble as raw goats’ milk can be transformed into something so sublime!

Depends on the crottin
Now, of course, if this object of government suspicion and censure were a REAL crottin, and somebody wanted to eat it, say, in the name of his sexual preferences, then it would be in no danger of being outlawed. Am I going too far? I give you the report in the Boston Globe of Sunday, July 30, in which we learn that the Bayside Expo Center was the venue for the “Fetish Fair Fleamarket,” attendance over 2,000. The fair featured “100 makers of whips, handcuffs, and torture tools.” True, civil rights suffered when an S&M party in a small, peaceful town earlier in the month was raided, but public opinion (at least as filtered through the Globe, which reported not one word about what any possible opposition to this group could have been) was behind the victims. “It blows my mind that people can go out on the weekend and shoot each other with paint balls, but two consenting adults can’t whip each other,” was the quote that ended the article.

Oddly, this article was on the very same page, indeed adjacent to, another article about a girl—ten years old—from another small, peaceful town. She had been abducted by a 16-year old boy, raped, beaten, and tossed in a Dumpster, the refuse of his rampage. She survived, thankfully, crawled out, and sought help from a Samaritan who admitted that his “first instinct was to get a bat and go looking for this guy.” The juxtaposition of the two articles struck me. Perhaps fathers and mothers of ten-year-old girls don’t want to have S&M thrust in their faces in their own neighborhoods, nor do they want to deal with the overflow of our promiscuous culture, nor to have to rescue their children from Dumpsters.

In France (a country I do not argue is immune to our brand of irresponsibility to youth), the greatest cheeses (like the wines) are subject to stringent controls to protect their unadulterated quality. Here, we are so deeply suspicious of anything not subjected to the killing temperatures of food-police scrutiny, that even the appellation controllée is not good enough for us. We would rather rid our lives of every last morsel of goodness than submit to the risk of even the most hypothetical, abstract germ. Yet, we throw open Main Street to the vilest sorts of commerce imaginable. We mortally fear a disease where there is none, yet we see no relationship between adults’ license to parade their perversity and the mauling of a young girl, even when the data exist side by side on the page.

I simultaneously mourn the lost complexity of the cheese and the lost innocence of the child. Somehow, losing the former—the symbol, to me, of the great texture, purity, and humility of culture —leads directly to the latter—the torn and bleeding future.

What kind of crottin are they going to feed us now?