The Slow Death of French Cheese

unheard.com has published an excellent article on how modern industry, marketing and politics are 'beigeing' France's massive range of cheese.

A precis follows:

In his small fromagerie at Saint Point Lac in the Jura, Fabrice Michelin produces hand-made, raw-milk Mont d’Or cheeses. He is the last person in France to do so.

“I get up at 5am. I collect the milk from the farms in the village. I warm the milk,” Mr Michelin told me. “I scoop it into cylinders. I pay attention to the varying consistency and taste of the curd. It alters subtly with the seasons, depending on the qualities of the grass. I mould the cheeses by hand. Every cheese is a little different.”

“That’s what gets me into trouble,” M. Michelin said. “Brussels and Paris say that the cheeses must all be the same. There seem to be new rules every month. How can I carry on if all my cheeses have to be identical?”

The infinite variety of French cheeses — one of the finest achievements of French culture — is gradually being eroded. Only one in ten of the cheeses now consumed in France is made with raw-milk.

Search where you like in the finest cheese shops in France, you will no longer find a Bleu de Termignon or a Galette des Monts-d’Or. They are among 50 species of French cheese that have vanished, like rare flowers or butterflies, in the last 40 years. Other varieties, like Vacherin d’Abondance and M. Michelin’s hand-made Mont d’Or have been reduced to a single producer.

Many of the best-known French cheeses — Brie or Pont L’Evêque or Camembert are overwhelmingly made in large factories with pasteurised or sterilised milk.

The traditional French soft, runny cheese is made with untreated milk, maintained at the temperature at which it leaves the cow’s udder (37C). There is no attempt made to kill off all bacteria, since that is what makes the cheese, including the chalky white flore — a form of fungus — which appears naturally on the rind.

There will be listeria germs in the cheese at some stage — since listeria is everywhere — but they will be fought and defeated by other naturally occurring bacteria. If this were not so, soft cheese would have been poisoning people for centuries.

Campaigning by Mme Richez-Lerouge and others has slowed the march of industrial cheese with traditional French names in the last decade. In some years, the market share for lait cru cheeses has edged up — only to edge down again. The avalanche of regulation continues.
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