I’m co-hosting an Argentina/Antarctica-themed party this evening and trying to shop for Argentine products. It is easy to find Argentine wine but none of the stores in Cambridge have Argentine cheese. I searched a bit and discovered http://www.usitc.gov/publications/docs/tata/hts/bychapter/1210C04.pdf, which gives the import quotas for cheese by country. It turns out the annual aggregate amount is about 50 million kg of cheese from all countries. That works out to about one third of a pound per American. That’s only about 1/100th of total cheese consumption in the U.S., therefore that can legally be from a foreign country.

It is a good thing that we are so eloquent at educating other countries on the benefits of free trade…

[Separately, note the crazy amount of cheese that can come from New Zealand, nearly half as much as from all of the European Community.]