camembert

Yet another challenge to real food - large cheese producers in France are pushing to change the AOC for Camembert to allow the use of processed milk.

Camembert is big business in France. According to the Maison du Lait, the French dairy industry’s federation, the country produced 112,000 tons last year. Most of it is mass produced, pasteurized and, according to Camembert purists, tasteless. Only about 12,000 tons, made with raw milk from Normandy, was awarded A.O.C. status.

We had our own raw milk excitement here in Ann Arbor - one of our two main wine shops was implicated in a... dare I call it a 'raw milk ring', or perhaps 'gang'. Obviously people feel quite strongly about it ("Barbara Frank of Livonia says she thinks nothing of driving 60 miles round-trip to pick up the creamy raw milk she credits with helping to keep her family healthy.")

I must confess to some surprise at the heightened feelings surrounding the raw milk subject (the heightened feelings around the AOC change don't surprise me at all). It seems simple enough to let people choose, but clearly someone decided that requiring companies to deliver a safe product wasn't enough of a solution.

The large French Camembert producers want to make more money exporting their product with Pasteurized milk and yet charge the higher prices due to the foreigner's notion that AOC means quality. These are the large producers who's goal is purely financial. Their goals are neither quality nor "safety".

Which then brings us to the larger notion of a "safe" product? The French invented Pasteurization. However they then rapidly exported it to the anglosaxons who have somehow associated it with "safety".

Meanwhile we here in France have been enjoying our raw milk chesses for centuries without any of the diseases the anglosaxons associate with these dangerous substances and with some of the lowest percentages of heart disease which is also associated with rich foods such as raw milk cheeses.

We'd rather live dangerously, happy and healthy... thanks... and with much more taste!

This is one of those times when I actually sympathize with the folks who say America is over regulated. But then I realize that while on the one hand we have issues like this where it really should be the choice of the individual consumer as to how safe they want their comestibles, so long as the risk is made clear to the buyer. On the other hand, that would require an informed and educated public, which is generally missing. Plus, there is the question of how to draw the line between something that is potentially dangerous, and something that is truly dangerous. After all, which Corporations pulling the crap that they do now, which falls decidedly into the latter category, I'm pretty sure that I don't want to give them any more leeway. I mean, what this really comes down to is how you define a 'safe' product, and can you have different versions of 'safe' for different groups.

I have to agree with Andrew's final statement without necessarily agreeing with the rest. "It all comes down to how you define a "safe" product.". Here in France we do not consider un-Pasteurised products as unsafe or dangerous. We've been ingesting and digesting them for hundreds of years without any great problems or diseases. Not only do we not consider un-Pasteurised products as dangerous in many cases we consider them as preferable to the overly industrialised and Pasteurised products especially when it comes to cheese. I've always joked with friends, and my children, about the one thing that, even at my relatively advanced age, would get me out fighting on the streets in revolt: if ever they try and take away our raw-milk cheeses!!! It is the EU, and more specifically the countries which produce cheeses which do not lose any flavour when Pasteurised (Holland with Edam, England with Cheddars (although a Pasteurised Stilton is definitely less enjoyable to me), Germans with... whatever they call cheese {g} and the Swiss with their Emmental), who have tried to put through that raw milk cheeses are "dangerous". The one thing I have learned after living for so long in a country which is not my country of origin and childhood: "Normal" or "good" are regional terms. What is considered as completely and logically normal in one country or region can be, and often is, considered as complete nonsense elsewhere. In those cases neither is right or wrong... they are only right or wrong for their regions.