Camembert, one of France's greatest cheeses and as much an emblem of the country as the Gallic cock, is suddenly on its death bed. Amazingly enough, this impending loss is provoking very little comment. Lactalis and the Cooperative d'Isigny, the two dairy companies that produce 90 percent of France's AOC Camembert—the real McCoy, made from raw milk—have decided to suspended AOC production. (That doesn't mean that Camembert is going to disappear, but what you'll now find at the hypermarche, where most of the French shop today, will be the tasteless, chalky Camemberts made from pasteurized milk, the kind available anywhere else in the world.) But the real live cheese that slowly ripens, like all raw milk cheeses, to achieve its full deliciousness may be history. The two companies say they want to "reinforce the sanitary security" of their production, a vague excuse that reeks of the legalese that's now the common tongue of agricultural regulations coming out of Brussels, which has altered many a beloved, and traditional, product over the years (including the British banger). In this case, though, the dairy companies are not reacting to any new E.U. edict but making the decision on their own—jumping the gun on restrictions perceived down the line.
Though The Times of London was horrified enough to run an editorial denouncing the decision as "a combination of bureaucracy, sanitary panic, and culinary fascism," the move has produced only a whimper of comment in France, the exception being Francois Simon, food writer for Le Figaro, who compared the death of raw-milk Camembert to the disappearance of a spoken language and urged the French to "save this monument in peril." A very small amount of raw-milk Camembert will continue to be produced, of course, but it will be much harder to find and surely more expensive. Among the brands to look for are Reaux, Gillot, Saint-Loup, and Bon Choix. Otherwise, Lactalis's President brand, the equivalent of a cheese with a lobotomy since it's made with pasteurized milk, looks set to dominate the market. Many Americans, of course, have never eaten a raw-milk cheese, since draconian U.S.D.A. regulations mean that very little raw-milk cheese from France or any other country finds its way to U.S. stores. So chalk one up for the agro-industrial complex, and shed a tear for the death of a great French cheese.
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