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Taking on dairy giants over the future of cheese

In his tiny workshop with a view of his cows, Francois Durand stood lovingly ladling raw milk curd into cheese moulds. After several weeks of salting, ripening and maturing, these would turn into the pungent, oozing camembert that is France’s favourite soft cheese — as much part of the national stereotype as the Basque beret, the baguette and a glass of red wine.

“When you use raw, unpasteurised milk, the taste is nice and fruity,” Durand mused as he inspected the smelly contents of his ripening rooms. “You can taste what the cows have been eating at different times of year.”

Durand is the last dairy farmer in the tiny Normandy village of Camembert, France, still making traditional, raw milk camembert cheese. But the farm’s visitor book hints at the bitter cheese wars that have poisoned the air of the surrounding hills and dales. “Be brave!” urges one scribbled French entry. “Keep up the fight! Thanks for defending real cheese.”

For months, small cheese producers and camembert connoisseurs have been engaged in a battle with France’s industrial dairy giants.

Camembert is the country’s best-selling cheese after emmental, so it is not surprising that industry moved in to mass-produce it, buying up small producers and delivering vast amounts of cheaper, machine-produced camembert to supermarkets. There are only five traditional producers left of the prized “Camembert de Normandie”.

Last year, the two industrial giants that produced 80 per cent of the Normandy camembert which carried France’s famous Apellation d’Origine Controlee (AOC) stamp of approval decided to make most of their camembert with pasteurised rather than raw milk. They said they wanted to protect consumers’ health because, when manufacturing large volumes, they could not ensure raw milk was free of dangerous bacteria. Pasteurising their milk — a process cheaper and better suited to mass-production — meant the giants could no longer carry the prized AOC label.

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