Posted on 06/28/2002 5:44:44 PM PDT by Pokey78
A LOW-FAT French cheese has been greeted with outrage by the country’s traditional cheesemongers, who see it as an attack on a centuries-old way of life. The Fine Bouche cheese boasts of its role in the fight against cardiovascular disease but it has had the opposite effect on purists, whose blood-pressure is soaring as they spring to the defence of France’s old-fashioned high-fat, high-taste fromage. They are furious at the implication that if Fine Bouche is good for you, other cheeses are not. The debate is political and cultural, pitting the French art de vivre against what is seen as the Anglo-Saxon obsession with health. But it is also philosophical, raising an ancient question: is pleasure or survival the ultimate human goal? Georges Langlade, president of the Parisian Association of Cheesemongers, has few doubts about the answer. “A cheese without fat is like a wine without alcohol — a total nonsense,” he said. “In fact, to me it is not a cheese at all. “We have an exceptional range and variety of cheeses that have been around for at least 1,000 years in France and other countries are jealous of them. We should be eating those cheeses and not fiddling around to produce something that is totally unnatural.” That opinion is not shared by Bongrain-Gerard, a dairy firm that markets Le Caprice des Dieux, which, in 1956, was France’s first industrially produced cheese. Its Fine Bouche range has already achieved a dominant position in the low-fat cheese market and is likely to expand further when this latest product goes on sale in September. Bongrain-Gerard says it is the first cheese that combines low fat with the soft, ripe texture and ruddy crust that produce the powerful aromas that French consumers appreciate. “When you take the fat out of cheese, you tend to take the taste out,” a company spokesperson said. “The aim of firms such as ours has always been to get around that problem.” With a fat rate of 27 per cent, compared with the normal 60 per cent, Fine Bouche is aimed at the 10 million French people — mainly men over 50 — suffering from high cholesterol. For Bongrain-Gerard, the stakes are high. The average French person consumes an average of 25kg of cheese a year, compared with 17kg across Europe and 9.5kg in Britain. Low-fat products account for only 2 per cent of the French market, but are one of the fastest-growing sectors, rising by 11 per cent last year. With consumer trends tending to harmonise across Europe, the company believes that les fromages allégés could soon be as important in France as they are on the British side of the Channel, where low-fat products account for 12 per cent of the cheese market. The likes of M Langlade, however, will resist such a prospect, arguing that for all its high-fat cheeses, France has less cardiovascular disease that almost any other Western nation. “In America, they eat hamburgers and so everyone over there is unhealthy,” M Langlade said. “But in France, we have a balanced diet, and as part of that diet, there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t continue to eat our traditional cheeses. We don’t want to go down the same road as Holland, where all the cheeses taste the same.”
I agree. However, I would encourage continued research and experimentation. My perception is that other low-fat dairy products (ice cream/ice milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, etc.) have substantially improved in recent years; they're not as good as their full-fat counterparts, but either they're getting closer, or my taste is acclimating itself to low-fat products via continued exposure to them.
They're not close yet with cheese, but who's to say that continued experimentation won't begin to yield acceptable products? Of course, with my luck, they'll come up with excellent low-fat sharp Cheddar and Parmesan the day after I assume room temp due to a stroke. :-(
Eaker
PS: Would somebody post a map of the Louve where they keep all of the white flags??
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