Sophie Michel argues that America’s obsession with control, optimization, and risk management is making people miserable, and that cheese offers a surprisingly coherent philosophy for living better. Drawing on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes, Michel connects the Bay Area’s hustle culture to broader American anxieties about safety and perfection, tracing how those anxieties shape everything from fitness tracking to food policy. In the U.S., she explains, cheese is legally required to be pasteurized, plastic-wrapped, and refrigerated: a product designed to eliminate risk at the cost of flavor, culture, and joy. Michel contrasts this with France, where raw-milk cheeses are celebrated, school lunches run two hours, and a “right to disconnect” law protects workers from after-hours demands. She grounds the comparison in her own Franco-American household, observing the stark difference between her French father, who eats slowly and stops before he’s full, and her American mother, who eats on the move in a state of constant stress. Michel’s argument is ultimately about acceptance: that decay, imperfection, and slowness are not problems to be solved but natural parts of life to be embraced. Eating cheese every day, she suggests, is a small but meaningful act of resistance against a culture that has confused control with wellness.

Photo: Photo Courtesy of Unsplash/Dana Ward