The Cheese Wars

California Cheese has had an ongoing commericial here “Its the Cheese” for a number of years. They compare themselves to that ‘Wisconsin stuff’ in a most favorable light. Happy, contented cows, udderly healthy and calm, stand in wide open green pastures among gently rolling Californai hills, as they discuss among themselves their less fortunate relatives in Wisconsin, who always seem to be negotiating six foot snow drifts, in a driving blizzard.

Quite effective advertising for the California Cheese Board.

After all, California cheese is robust, thick and flavorful, and is made in endless variety. Its not at all like that weak, tasteless, watery stuff from Wisconsin. California cheese comes from happy cows. Who wouldn’t know that?

This kind of ad campaign is not at all like the California Orange Juice campaign and the Florida Orange Juice campaign. Those two are not at war. All Florida orange juice is shipped to California, and all California orange juice is shipped to Florida, where people in their respective states are urged to drink and enjoy the rare and unique orange juice that is imported from across the continent by the AFL,CIO truckers association. Fact is, you cannot buy California orange juice in California, and vice-versa for Florida.

Back to the Cheese Wars.

Recent activity by the all powerful South Coast Air Quality Management District (vagrant son of the AQMD), here in California (of all places), has put California Dairy owners on notice that their smog polluting cows will soon be corked up, so-to-speak. Seems all these happy, contented cows produce manure as well as milk, and that bovine menthane and ammonia production has got to stop. (As recently reported by ABCNews.com)

I, for one will miss that smell. When one has a head cold or hay fever, just a simple drive past a feed lot with your windows down can do wonders for clearing your sinuses.

Surprizingly, almost all of California’s 600,000 cows do not live in wide open green rolling pastures, as was thought. Instead, they live almost exclusively in feed lots in tiny Chino California, a crowded little place East of L.A. Chino is perfectly flat land, (also known as dirt, with not a pasture in sight).

Chino is surrounded by hills, all right. But the surrounding hills are crowded too – with Condos, and those cheaply built (glued sawdust and particle board) half-million dollar houses (in the ever popular stuccoed two and a half story ‘barn’ architecture) in tracts where they reside mere inches from one another on lots barely bigger than the houses themselves.

So much for those happy cow ads.

This smog bill may do what the Wisconsin Cheese Cartel (a holdover from the Gestapo?) could not do, which is put a stop to milk and cheese production in Califonia. For residents here in California, this is a major crisis! Soon there will be no more California cheese, and we will all have to eat that insipid stuff imported from Wisconsin.

I wonder if the AFL,CIO has anything to do with this?

My advice to you is to buy up all the great variety of rich, rare, robust and flavorful California cheese you can, while you can. It may not be around much longer.

(Gad! It’s 3 A.M., and now I’ve made myself hungry!)