Fate of true camembert in doubt

Traditional camembert is in danger of dying out after two of the French cheese's biggest producers ended the 200-year-old custom of making it with "raw" milk.

Premium camembert - the oozing, pungent variety - is made from unpasteurised, unsterilised lait cru, mainly from Normandy cows.

But Lactalis, the world's biggest cheese maker, and the Isigny-Sainte-Mère cheese co-operative have now begun to use micro-filtered milk instead, arguing it is a necessary step to meet modern food safety requirements.

The pair have become the first French cheese producers to give up the Normandy camembert Appellation d'Origine Controlee (AOC) quality mark which specifies the use of raw milk. They are now only making small quantities of lait cru camembert for niche brands.

As a result of the opt-out, the AOC is coming under pressure to allow pasteurised milk. But traditionalists say that if this happens, the art of making genuine gooey camembert will soon die out.

"If they want to leave the AOC, they are free to do so, but we don't agree that the rules should be changed," said Bertrand Gillon, who runs Réaux, one of the five remaining camembert producers still using raw milk.

Mr Gillon's produce won top prize at last year's Paris agricultural fair, and workers at his family plant on the outskirts of Lessay still ladle out curdled milk into moulds by hand. He argues that filtering and heating milk removes the microbes that give it its distinctive farmyard flavour.

However, in December 2005, Mr Gillon had to close his factory for several weeks when six children became ill after eating its camembert.

In response, Luc Morelon, a spokesman for Lactalis, said: "I don't want to risk sending any more children to hospital. It's as simple as that."

But Mr Gillon believes his multinational competitors are using health issues as a smokescreen. "They are interested in mass production. You can't use lait cru for the mass market, as you can only guarantee top quality with a relatively small number of milk producers," he said.

With Lactalis and Isigny-Sainte-Mère together accounting for 90 per cent of production, the amount of AOC Normandy camembert available is set to plummet. Next year only 4,000 tons will be made according to the original recipe given to Marie Harel, an inhabitant of Camembert, by a priest from Brie fleeing French Revolutionaries in 1791.

It is also feared that AOC rule changes could threaten the future of other cheeses made from raw milk, such as Brie de Meaux, first produced in the 8th century.

I´m in Europe. It´s just, that whenever I´m in the US, I don´t see any good domestic cheese. I´m sure that there are some excellent regional products, but I´m wondering why they´re not sold nation-wide.

It's a reasonable question.

For nation-wide distribution, I believe that Iowa's Maytag Blue is sold nationally, and it is a good blue cheese.

I´m sure that there are some excellent regional products, but I´m wondering why they´re not sold nation-wide.

I'm an American, from the deep South (Alabama-Georgia, Sherman's March country) but have lived in the western US and Canada for the past 50 years. The last place I've eaten Vermont cheddar is in San Francisco, some 2500 miles (4000 km) from Montpelier, Vermont. No other American cheeses that I ate there have stayed in memory.

Is it that your meat is so good that the American consumer simply doesn´t need cheese

I don't eat meat, so I won't comment.

The eating of exotic foods and fine wines is a luxury to available for mass consumption only in wealthy countries, and you'd likely be grateful for a bit of soup and a shot of cheap vodka to go with your crust of bread in the "German Democratic Republic" had the US not provided money for reconstruction and protection from the USSR after WWII.

The US is a young country, Arizona becoming the last of the contiguous states in 1912, and was relatively poor, on average, until well after the end of WWII. Much of the area where I grew up was still mired in poverty when I moved away in 1957 -"Reconstruction" for the South had been a bitter joke after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

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