The French like to say that “a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.” Cyclops phobia aside, I’ve never said no to the fromage. Ever. Ask the jeans I wore in Paris.

James Joyce, on the other hand, called cheese the “corpse of milk.”

No offense, Jimbo, but it’s so much more than that.

Milk does not become cheese to die. Milk becomes cheese to transcend, well, everything.

Cheese ferments at the delicate intersection of culture and politics. It is essentially the culinary equivalent of Jesus.

It has long staved off famines and soothed weary travelers. In modern times, legions of housewives, pizzerias, and Mexican restaurants everywhere have melted it into comfort food sainthood. Devout cults have formed in some countries to worship the various incarnations of the dairy nectar.

It has been, across time and place, the great unifier and divider.

Andrew Jackson, the 7th President of the United States, was famously sent a 1,400-pound wheel of cheese by a New York dairy farmer in 1835. He left it to age in the White House entrance hall for two years (the smell must have been delightful). Jackson then held an open party and invited the public to come and eat this cheese. It was gone in a mere two hours.

Andy Jackson understood that cheese was a vehicle by which politicians could reach the people. He had 1,400 pounds of cheese and a reputation to uphold. They were hungry. It all worked out.

Fast-forward a century to June 1940. Winston Churchill was certain that France would be on the winning side of the war because “a country producing almost 360 types of cheese cannot die.”

His old buddy Charles De Gaulle, in his later attempts to rein in a distinctly vivacious Fifth Republic, expressed his exasperation, asking how one “could be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese.”

They weren’t exactly strong on the math, but they were on to something. Cheese is to France as money is to Wall Street. The two are inextricably and often frustratingly linked in their roller coaster ride across history.

In 2008, France produces more than 1,000 distinct varieties of cheese and is the world’s largest cheese exporter. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy covers many French cheeses through a Protected Designation of Origin, which means that traditional specialties are immune for all of bureaucratic perpetuity.

In this cocoon of legislative security, the French population consumes more cheese per capita than any other nation on Earth (except Greece, their feta be damned). And, as attested by the number of gorgeous two-eyed Parisian women, every meal ends with the tangy hardness of a Comté, the redolent stench of a ripe Pont-l’Évêque, the buttery cream of a Brie-de-Meaux, or the nuttiness of a Tomme de Savoie.

To the French, anything pasteurized and packaged in plastic represents a callous affront to the collective psyche of the nation.

I discovered the hard way that even REFRIGIRATION proves scandalous.

I had a colleague in Marseille (let’s call her Martine) who loved to impart her French ways upon my heathen North American soul. She used to invite me to her apartment for elaborate Sunday eating marathons. One week, I went into her kitchen before the 17th course and noticed the unmistakable stench of Brie emanating from under a clear plastic case on the counter. I made the mistake of asking her why she didn’t put her cheese in the fridge.

“But Andréa, you never put zee fromage in zee fridge! You kill zee cheese! KILL! It must ripen and evolve like all living zhings!”

To this day, Martine refuses to believe that I would commit the crime of refrigeration.

For her and her people, the Kraft Single goes beyond ultimate insult. It is the stuff of freaky science fiction.

Yet the nation that birthed the Kraft Single is just as deeply marked by le fromage.

The United States ranks as the world’s foremost cheese producer. Total output was a whopping 9.67 billion pounds in 2007.

That says as much about America as Brie does about France.

Even more telling is cheese’s role as the American wedge issue par excellence.

In a now-famous 2007 campaign stop, Arugula Obama was born in Iowa causing, as we say in Québec, “a storm in a water glass.” Thus, while visiting Philadelphia this April, he was viciously criticized for his elitist sampling of artisanal goat cheese and Spanish ham that retailed at $100 per pound and his failure to chow down a Philly cheesesteak.

And for extra-sharp distinction, while Obama made stellar photo-op stops in the Middle East on July 23rd, the media caught up with John McCain in a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He held a press conference about his misstatements on the troop surge — in front of an aisle of hanging processed cheese.

Meanwhile, during some free Sargento airtime in America, cheese rocked its culinary Jesus role on the other side of the world. On May 14th, a giant round of “Caucasian cheese” was unveiled in Armenia by a group of Turks and Armenians. They hoped that their “regional peace cheese” could act as a symbol of their desire to reopen the sealed Turkish-Armenian border. Then, on September 6th, Turkey’s president traveled to Armenia, making the first visit by a Turkish leader in the nations’ complicated history.

Take that, James Joyce.

Andréa Girardin is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at asg44@cornell.edu. Raisin d’être appears alternate Fridays. The Sun thanks Prof. Isaac Kramnick, government for the De Gaulle reference.