Cheese ( from Economist)

Food fashion in France 

Low culture

Feb 18th 2010 | PARIS 
From The Economist print edition

The latest threat to the French way of life

ROQUEFORT, camembert, brie de Meaux, Saint-Félicien, gruyère, comté, münster, pont l'évêque, cantal, reblochon, tomme de Savoie, crottin de chavignol. A spontaneous familiarity with the display on a three-tier cheese trolley is essential to the national identity of the French. Each of them guzzles 25kg of the stuff per year, second only to the Greeks. Now, though, there are disturbing signs that the land of the unpasteurised gourmet cheese is being colonised by pale plastic-packed foreign stuff.

Last year, despite the recession, overall French cheese consumption grew. Yet to the dismay of purists, sales of such soft cheeses as camembert and brie dropped by 2%, according to the National Interprofessional Centre of the Dairy Economy. The fastest-growing sales, by contrast, were in the category covering Italian mozzarella and Greek feta, which jumped by 10% (although overall volumes remain small).

Some of this is explained by the rise of the pizza, now part of the French staple diet. In 2008 Domino's Pizza, an American home-delivery firm, saw its French sales jump by 31%, as its outlets spread across the country like melting mozzarella. Another factor is France's sandwich boom. These days the French spend on average just 31 minutes munching their lunch, down from an hour and 38 minutes back in 1975. Young office types increasingly shun the sit-down brasserie meal in favour of le snacking: salads in plastic boxes or toasted panini, filled with yet more feta and mozzarella.

Artisan fromagers are hitting back. Next month will see a National Cheese Day, just after the annual Paris Agricultural Fair, a ritual event where mud and straw is imported into the capital and the French celebrate their roots in the terroirs. French cheese, says the Association Fromage de Terroirs, a lobby group, is not just food, but a "theme of national importance". It fears that traditional cheese-making, demanding raw milk, sweat and loving care, is being eclipsed by a bland, pasteurised industry, designed in part to suit foreign markets. Even in France only 15% of fine cheeses are made from unpasteurised milk. "The French now buy cheese as they buy washing powder," laments Véronique Richez-Lerouge, the group's president. The group sells a wall calendar featuring women in their underwear offering cheese (see slideshow), which "defends the values of the French art de vivre".

The trouble is that, even as traditionalists fret about industrialisation, French business is taking matters into its own hands. Santa Lucia and Salakis, two of the best-known brands of, respectively, Italian mozzarella and Greek feta on French hypermarket shelves, are owned by Lactalis, a vast dairy group with 127 industrial sites worldwide. The company's nationality? French.