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ON THE WAY OUT?  ABOVE: A selection of good French cheeses
on display with no plastic discernible. |
Catering to mass market
threatens French cheeses
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
I was in the cheese department of a Bordeaux supermarket last week when I thought I overheard a Frenchman singing: “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic cheeses, sittin’ on the dashboard of my car …”
Maybe it was me singing. I get confused.
But wherever this earworm was coming from, it was appropriate.
There is no shortage of plastic cheeses in France today. Yes,
another cherished legacy of the French past is being sacrificed
for money.
Taste-impaired pasteurized cheeses with six-month shelf life
are the favorites of the supermarket, and that’s where 90
percent of cheese is sold today. These cheeses are often packed
in tacky traditional straw bundles or wooden containers, with
illustrations of mustachioed peasants to imply homemade. They
lie. The stuff tastes like plastic.
It was Charles de Gaulle who moaned that it was impossible to govern a nation that produced as many cheeses as days in the year. He might find that quip less applicable today as traditions are trampled and agribusiness groups snap up the small producers. There were once about 20 distinct varieties of camembert in Normandy. Today they are mostly pasteurized and largely indistinguishable.
A product with a viable brand can be repositioned,
produced at 500 times the volume with a few robots, good software
and a lot of pasteurized milk, and turned into a major money-maker.
French cheese today has suffered the indignities of industrialization,
sacrificing variety and sharp taste for low-cost, high-volume
automated production. Purists worry that in a generation a large
portion of the French population will have no memory of what
a cheese is supposed to taste like.
Pasteurization is the trick that has also opened export markets to the unsuspecting consumer, especially in Britain and the United States. Despite the compromises they are making, the French remain confident of their superiority. The British, who make a large variety of good cheddars and stiltons, took fright a few years ago when French imports started to hurt. A Welsh dairy invented a concoction that more or less mimicked some of the French imports. A French radio journalist went to the product launch and brought home a sample. His judgment: “For me, it’s inedible, but my dog loved it.”
Last week a three-hour special on French television questioned the wisdom of tampering with great cheese-making traditions. Modern techniques to provide year-round goat cheese were described, including the insertion of hormones in goats’ vaginas to confuse their milk-producing cycle. (As this was mentioned, the camera zoomed on to a she-goat looking apprehensive.) So now a good Crottin de Chavignol can be had at Christmas, not just in the spring.
Now the United States has spawned a lively cheese-appreciation culture that looks a lot like France used to be. French purists see the irony in this seeming contradiction. The TV documentary went to Vermont where the organizer of a fresh-milk cheese competition said a few years ago there were 200 American cheese-makers competing for ribbons. Last year there were 900.
One market unlikely to make a difference in the world cheese market is China, where the strong odor of ripening cheeses is equated with an outhouse in summer. In France the traditionalists claim to like the odor and they differentiate between the smell and the taste.
Doomsayers fear that chemistry eventually will destroy the cheese industry. It is already possible to produce a neutral paste and add chemical flavorings of any sort to approximate the real article. French wine makers harbor the same fears for their centuries-old natural reds and whites.
I dropped in to my local cheese shop in Bordeaux the other day to see if there was a look of desperation on the owner’s face. Not at all. Her shop was full of bobos, the French term for bourgeois bohèmes (yuppies). I asked her if she was worried. “Not at all,” she said, “at least not yet.” Her business will hold up as long as enough people are willing to spend more for a little spice in their life.
©2008 by Michael Johnson. This column first posted Jan. 7, 2008.
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