There are many reasons to like Kyrgyzstan. It has extraordinarily lovely women: some mad collision of Persian, Turkish, Russian, Mongol and Chinese genes makes for supermodels at every bus stop. It is safe, friendly, cheap. Its cities are commonly free of rubbish and graffiti (how does Central Asia do this, yet we cannot?). Despite these charms, it has few tourists.
However, I can’t say anything positive about the cheese – because the cheese is dreck. Last night I went to the Globus supermarket here in downtown Bishkek and bought a sample of the local fromage. When I got it home, it was like chewing a rubber toy: tasteless, over-firm, banal. In the end I was reduced to smothering it in Sriracha to make it vaguely flavoursome.
And as I sat there in the dusty, fading Kyrgyz light, I had a cheesy epiphany. I began to ask myself: how come Central Asia doesn’t make any decent cheese? They have plentiful grassland. They have sheep, goats, horses – even a few cows. Their national drink is mare’s milk, so they’re hardly lactose intolerant. Yet the cheese? Alas.
From there, my questions expanded. Lack-of-decent-cheese is not a uniquely Central Asian phenomenon. Nowhere in Asia produces fine cheese. Same goes for South America: almost none whatsoever. Nada. Ditto Africa – nothing notable in the cheese aisle, sorry.
How about North America and Australasia? Again, apart from a few artisans in Vermont or Victoria, there is basically none. I still remember a visit I made to a Wal-Mart in Natchez, Mississippi, where I discovered, as an excited cheese lover, that the cheese aisle was about a mile long. However, on inspection I found that this mile of cheese contained only four varieties: Cheddar, ‘Jack Cheddar’, Philadelphia and ‘cheese shaped like characters out of Finding Nemo’. At that point I decided that North American cheese is only made to amuse western Europeans in its awfulness.
And there’s the cheesy rub – western Europeans. When you think about it, western Europe – our sweet, exquisite, compact little half-continent – makes literally all of the best cheese on the globe. I can name my top ten iconic global cheeses, and they are all European: Roquefort, Brie, Époisses, Parmesan, Gorgonzola, Buffalo Mozzarella, blue Stilton, proper Cheddar (with those salty crystals, mmm), Gruyère and feta. From France, Italy, Britain, Switzerland and Greece. Civilised Europe.
Even if you dispute my top ten, the contenders bubbling under – Taleggio, Comté, Wensleydale, Manchego, aged Gouda, Camembert – are also western European.
By now I had hurled my cheese in the bin and was briskly tucking into my (decent) Saperavi Georgian red wine, and my mind was similarly racing. Why is it only western Europe that makes great cheese? Yes, perhaps there is some distinct combination of settled culture, mild climate, pleasant cows, ambitious farms, even great caves for ageing. But I refuse to believe this is unique – because it isn’t.
And what goes for cheese also goes for: wine, dessert wine, most churches, classical music, chocolate, democracy, philosophy, beautiful towns (despite the graffiti), novels, paintings, sculpture, car design, romantic poetry, cobbled streets, scientific invention, sensible bin collection, the Enlightenment, mathematics, astronomy, high fashion, football, cricket, tennis, rugby, skiing, hockey (thank you, England), the Renaissance, Goethe, charcuterie, Raphael, the law of perspective, proper castles, village greens, toasted crumpets, toast, champagne, that little posh biscuit you get with an espresso in France, gin and tonic, Scotch whisky, calculus, the Beatles, snooker, Shakespeare, television, Picasso, Flaubert, Paris, Venice, Verona, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bruges, Georgian housing, the piazza, Joyce, aperitifs, the theory of evolution, universities, habeas corpus, pizza, Freud, Aperol spritz, the internet, Isaac Newton and golf. They all come from western Europe – or they were adapted and absorbed by western Europe and then made so much better. As we did with cheese.
We Europeans are basically the best at everything, especially cheese
It is quite the list, is it not? It always surprises me that the Remain side in the Brexit campaign didn’t go with something like this – something exuberantly positive. Something proudly saying: we are European as well as British, and we Europeans are basically the best at everything, especially cheese. How could you not want to be in on that? It would have ignored all the downsides of the EU (from the democratic deficit to the mess that is the euro) – but it might have won. And won easily.
Why didn’t they try it? Probably because it would have seemed jingoistic, or racist, or brash. Or perhaps because they were dim. Nonetheless, it would have spoken an important truth. Europe is not perfect, but culturally and intellectually it is the engine room of civilisation.
Others have contributed great things, of course. China gave us paper and fireworks and bureaucracy. India gave us numerals, epic poetry and yoga. But only Europe managed to produce all of this – Catullus and croissants, opera and Oxford, marzipan and Michelangelo – and bind it into something coherent, something imitable, something global and wondrous.
And the rest of the world knows this. Here in Bishkek they’ve just opened a pseudo-French café that serves decent cappuccinos, while local singers croon their way through covers of English-language songs. The shelves are stacked with Lindt and Toblerone; they all scoff cheesy pizzas and sandwiches. Western Europe is admired, envied, resented – and badly copied, often all at once. Half the world wants to live in Europe; the other half wants to be photographed next to it. Europe receives 50 per cent of all global tourism.
Perhaps the most interesting of these complex, troubled global attitudes to Europe can be found in the United States. Because if you think Donald Trump, Elon Musk and J.D. Vance are crude American chauvinists, you’re wrong. They may bluster, bark and bind themselves in Old Glory – but deep down they are disappointed children of Europe. They are not rejecting the Old World; they are a Kraft Single grieving Brie de Meaux.
The modern American right looks across the Atlantic and sees the continent that gave them their ancestors, their laws, their language, their architecture, their religion, their art – and they see it weakening. They see Europe afraid to defend itself, ashamed of its past, unable to define its future. And like furious heirs watching a great family home fall into disrepair, they lash out. So that is what dreadful Kyrgyz cheese tells us about Donald J. Trump. Next I’m going to try the local biscuits. I fear they may not match a chocolate Leibniz.
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