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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

I work at a foreign language instruction company. Two of the funniest moments happened at the same lunch. The Italians declaring, "Americans use too much garlic." And the Turkish declaring, "Americans have too many kinds of cheese. Cheese is just cheese."

I've been known to put garlic, onions, and shallots into a dish.

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Interestingly, Turks have broadly one type of cheese (not really true, but compared to France let's go with it) per use. So cheese really isn't just cheese.

You have your cheese for sandwiches and melting, you have your cheese for stuffing pastries, you have your cheese for breakfast, you have a couple of ones with special shapes like the braided ones. And please, try not to mix these up. The white cheese for breakfast is not the one for the pastry, even though it looks similar. And why do Europeans crumble any sort on their dishes and call it Turkish? The nerve!

In some sense, Turks are some of the least "Cheese is cheese" people I met.

@~"Cheese is cheese."

And I guess that's the moment when the French "delegation" collectively gasped, and left the table in protest? :D

Moving to France and discovering that every grocery store always has an entire aisle full of Cheeses was a mind-bending discovery for me. The aisle stinks, mind you, but nothing can beat Raclette after a winter's day out. The other amazing realisation was just how seriously bread is taken in these parts, with that famous No Such Thing observation that bakers in Paris may not take a vacation without putting a sign to the nearest boulangerie.

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