There is an interesting study out this week on cheese consumption that shows some surprising statistics on the consumption of food around the world. For anyone who has been to France, it will hardly surprise you that the French lead the world in cheese consumption but the amount is staggering? How much cheese do you believe that average French person eats a year?
If you guessed 57 pounds per person you are correct. That’s right, the French eat the equivalent of a small child in cheese every year. And yet they remain a remarkably fit and thin people.
The new report from the International Dairy Federation shows equally high levels of consumption among other European nations with people consuming an average of 43 pounds a year.
That is compared to the Chinese who eat less than .074 pounds of cheese per person, though cheese imports are rising by almost 25 percent a year.
The United States falls below Europe in consumption at 34 pounds a year.
One of the benefits of traveling to Europe is to try the amazing array of different cheeses. Going into the various cheese shops in French towns is one of my favorite parts of visiting the country. Few people can go back to processed cheese after such an exposure. However, I have found that our own artisan cheeses are pound for pound as good as those that I have found in Europe. There is simply more to choose from in Europe. However, in my lifetime, I have seen a wonderful change in standard grocery stores in the addition to different and better cheeses. You still have to go to high-end stores for some of the artisan varieties, but you can now generally find varieties at a standard store that simply were not available. Like wines, the American palate is becoming more sophisticated and the market is expanding with world-class varieties (assuming our government will leave them alone as we discussed earlier).
In other words, the cheese gap is narrowing.
Source: Fox
Having spent time in France I can tell you that they eat a lot of odd things. Which is why French people are referred to as Frogs.
BarkingDog – the commonly held assumption is that the French are called Frogs because they eat froglegs.
57 pounds a year? That’s only a pound a week! I’m going to have to check the cheese labels, but I’m 90% sure I eat about that much cheese….
Thanks to the power of suggestion contained in this topic, I have just eaten a dinner that was a plate of three artisan cheeses, fresh fruits, crusty French bread, olives, charcuterie, and a bottle of nice red wine.
I am now ready for le nap grand.
Carlyle – the government should perhaps get out of the business of telling us how to eat.
They got things terribly wrong for many decades.
But have they learned their lesson? Stick to roads and bridges and infrastructure?
Noooooooooo.
It appears that for most of the 20th century conventional wisdom as to what is a healthy diet has been jumping from wrong theory to wrong theory to wrong theory.
This ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) Catalyst program from 2014-11-13 is an example of the most recent leap which is hopefully not also wrong.
In summary carbs are out full stop, fats are in including saturated fats which are now known to be much less evil than previously thought. Now excessive consumption of carbs of whatever type is the source of all problems as they do not generate a feeling of sateity and thus cause snacks between meals which generate obesity, Protein and fat if the main portion of the diet cause people to feel full and the fat and protein get burned when the body switches to ketosis as the pathway in which food is burnt.
So enjoy steak, milk, cheeze, yogurt, olive oil. It appears that the western diet as at the end of the nineteenth century was much closer to an optimal diet for humans than the various fads introduced by dieticians throughout the 20th century. In particular the FDA food pyramid is most egregiously wrong.
I ironed grilled cheese sandwiches in college, so it must be possible to do while drunk.
Chip – drunk or sober you cannot ruin ironing a grilled (ironed) cheese sandwich.
Maybe if I drank beer, I would do more ironing. Unfortunately, I get tipsy off a thimbleful of alcohol. Wonder how the ironing would turn out.
Nick – that’s funny. Reminds me of the story about how my German Grandma used to brew her own beer during Prohibition. Things went awry in one batch, and the bottles started exploding in the bathtub during a visit where the parish priest came calling.
My dad said that she had told him that throughout her upbringing, all her German relatives drank beer with meals, and yet she’d never seen any of them drunk. It was just a relaxing beverage, no mystique.
Darren – that shouldn’t count as cheese. It’s more like hydrogenated oil.
The French in Paris can eat everything they want because they walk, a lot! We have a wonderful cheese shop in Del Mar with cheeses from all over the world.