Appreciates local cheese

To the editor:

France claims to have more than 800 types of cheese. On a long-ago version of the Travel Channel, they showed a burly, hirsute man stirring the pre-cheese liquid with his entire bear-hair arm. The camera close-up showed perspiration copiously dripping into the mixture from his armpit and nose.

More recently, TV host Andrew Zimmern visited the Paris site of the man to whom the French government bestowed a medal as their nation's finest cheesemaker. Zimmern described the odor as "the air is thick with a smell like rotten eggs trampled by the unwashed feet of a thousand teenage boys."

Today, the Italian countryside was the setting of a small artisanal cheesemaker. They allow flies to lay eggs inside the soft pre-cheese and close it up. When it is finished and ready to eat, one cuts the top off the now hardened cheese and sees a zillion squirming maggots. The reeking cheese is scooped out straight into the waiting mouths of people far less discerning than I - maggots and all - declared to taste better once it has passed through the maggots digestive systems.

My point? Thank goodness for Matanuska Creamery!

Carol Neuerman

Palmer