I’m not a big fan of Roquefort cheese. In fact, I won’t eat any cheese that has bits of visible mold in it — aka “blue cheese” — and I live in France, anyway, so this news doesn’t affect me at all. But if you’re in the US and you can’t imagine living without your Roquefort, you’re in big trouble.
On his way out of office, George W. Bush has decided to triple the import duties on the French cheese in response to the European Union’s refusal to import the hormone-laden American beef.
Now, I do eat beef, so this does actually affect me. I didn’t eat meat at all until I moved to France, partly because I trusted the meat here to be healthier than it is in the US (I was still a vegetarian during the Mad Cow scare that grazed France). If the French restaurants start serving meat imported from the US, I may just have to go back to my vegetarianism. Hmph. So as much as I don’t like the moldy stuff, please do make a fuss, or put more pressure on USDA to stop allowing antibiiotics and hormones into American meat.