Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  The real shrine to Camembert (the cheese) was Vimoutiers, a town of five thousand people just a few kilometers down the road. Apparently, the two municipalities had long battled over bragging rights to Camembert. The village of Camembert had the name but Vimoutiers had the numbers; the majority won, and it was now Vimoutiers that was considered the cradle of Camembert. The town had a Camembert museum of its own and also boasted not one but two statues of Marie Harel. The original, located near the cathedral, was headless, having been decapitated in a German bombing raid during the Second World War. The replacement statue, which according to the plaque was given to the town by “400 men and women making cheese in Van Wert, Ohio, USA in cooperation with the committee on aid to Vimoutiers,” stood outside a building called the Hall of Butter, across a plaza from city hall.

  But while Vimoutiers had the inanimate monuments to the glories of Camembert, the village of Camembert had a living, breathing symbol in François Durand. His two-hundred-acre farm was located a few kilometers beyond the village of Camembert (what passed for it, anyway), down a narrow, tree-lined country lane with an expansive view of the surrounding hillsides, which were dotted with cows, sheep, horses, and ramshackle houses sending plumes of chimney smoke into the steely blue sky. It was scenery that could be found in a million different places in rural France, but familiarity made it no less breathtaking. Durand’s spread had a hardscrabble look about it, mostly owing to the farm equipment that was strewn about. Behind the main building was a cattle shed, in which several dozen cows were gathered. The presence of these cows, I shortly learned, was what set Durand apart from other Camembert producers and made him an heroic figure in the eyes of Camembert purists—and now, possibly, a martyr for the cause of true Camembert.

  Two men were waiting for me in the office: Gérard Roger and Francis Rouchaud. They were leaders of the Comité de Défense du Véritable Camembert, a local organization dedicated to preserving traditional Camembert, by which they meant artisanally produced, lait cru Camembert from Normandy. Neither was in the food business—Roger worked in communications, Rouchaud was a marketing consultant—but both were passionate cheese lovers who had thrust themselves to the front lines of the battle to save raw-milk Camembert. They were small fry going up against a pair of industrial giants, but it wasn’t until Roger and Rouchaud filled me in on some of the nuances of the Camembert situation that I fully understood just how quixotic an undertaking theirs was.

  They explained to me that there were only seven raw-milk Camembert producers left in Normandy, two of whom were Lactalis and Isigny Sainte-Mère. Of the five others, they said, four were “small industrial” producers—that is, they bought the milk that they used to make their cheese. Durand was the only real farmer of the bunch, because he had his own cows and gathered his own milk. But what difference did it make, so long as the milk was untreated? In their view, it was the transport that was the problem: Milk that was shipped, no matter how short the distance, invariably lost some of its character in transition. As far as they were concerned, even machine-milking the cows compromised quality. So Durand milked by hand? Actually, no, but they were willing to overlook that small transgression and focus on the bigger point: Durand, with his thirty Holsteins and thirty Norman cows, merely had to step out the back door to collect his milk, and the result was better, more distinctive Camembert—a true farmhouse Camembert. “He is sure of the quality of his milk, and it gives his cheese its taste,” said Rouchaud. But Durand was the only person in Normandy still making Camembert this way; he was a curio, something for tourists to see. Surely they weren’t suggesting that there was a future for Durand’s type of cheese making? “In the past, there were lots of farms making Camembert here,” Rouchaud replied. “In the Auvergne, you have two hundred thirty-four farms making Saint-Nectaire. There are eighty-six producers making Reblochon. Farm production can be valuable.”

  We put sanitary booties on our shoes and went back to see the man himself. Durand, a tall, wiry forty-six-year-old wearing rubber boots, a plastic white apron, and a hairnet, was ladling curds into dozens of molds when we arrived in his atelier, which combined the fastidiously clean, all-white look of an operating room with the oppressive humidity of a hothouse. Years of practice had given his ladling a rhythmic quality, and as he leaned over the table, one hand dropping chunks of tofu-like white curds into the plastic molds, the other hand tucked behind him, the image that came to mind was of an Olympic speed skater. Durand was not what I had expected. Given all the press he had received, I had expected him to be an ebullient character and a tireless self-promoter—a carnival barker. Instead, he turned out to be a taciturn man who exuded a certain strangeness. He seemed to be of another time and place, and after a moment’s reflection, I put my finger on it: There was something medieval about Durand. In fact, he was exactly what I imagined a fifteenth-century cheese-making monk would have looked like. His assistant, a sullen woman with an alarmingly full mustache, only amplified the feeling of having stepped into a scene out of the Middle Ages.

  At any rate, Durand didn’t seem especially interested in talking; fortunately for me, Roger and Rouchaud were happy to speak for him. They explained the Camembert-making process. Durand’s cows were milked early in the morning. A small amount of rennet, an enzyme extracted from the lining of a calf’s fourth stomach, was then added to each pail of milk to encourage the curdling process, and the milk was heated to 93 degrees Fahrenheit. Once optimal curdling was achieved, which took several hours, Durand would put the curds into the molds—six scoops in each. Depending on the amount of milk drawn in the morning, the farm typically produced four hundred to five hundred wheels of Camembert a day. The molds would later be salted, then spend two days in the haloir, or drying chamber, followed by fifteen days, give or take a few, in the salle d’affinage—the finishing room.

  Rouchaud said that a twenty- to twenty-seven-day gestation period would be preferable, but demand was sufficiently strong that Durand needed to get the cheese out the door. Also, holding it back an extra week or two would create “a problem of money,” as Rouchaud put it. Money already was a problem. Although his Camembert was far more labor-intensive, it fetched the same price as standard Camemberts: around $3.50 per wheel. “It’s so much work and such a low profit margin,” Rouchaud said. “But he’s obliged to sell it at the market price.” Charging five dollars per wheel would have eased the financial strain, perhaps enough to have allowed Durand to age the cheese for another week or ten days and possibly even have enabled him to invest in more Norman cows, which were less productive than the Holsteins but yielded better-quality milk.

  We eventually ended up back in the office, where we talked a little longer. Rouchaud and Roger then said they had to leave; I told them I was going to stick around and try to chat with Durand. With his spokesmen gone, he was somewhat more forthcoming, if not exactly loquacious. He told me he had been born in L’Aigle, a nearby town, and had moved to the farm as a child. His father had produced only milk. When Durand took over, in 1987, he decided to begin making Camembert—to turn the farm into “a place for true Camembert.” But it was not an easy pursuit, and circumstances were making it ever more difficult. The sterile work environment required by European Union regulations had scrubbed away some of the beneficial microbes that had previously lingered in the air and on the surfaces, and he admitted that even his cheese had lost some of its quality. These new regulations had not only affected the production of cheese, they’d made it very expensive—prohibitively so—for lots of small producers like Durand, and the cost of compliance was driving many of them out of business. Durand said the French public, having grown up on industrialized Camembert, no longer knew what the good stuff tasted like, and the Réaux incident had convinced many consumers that they didn’t want to know.

  At this point, it was a sense of duty that kept him going. There were people like Rouchaud and Roger who cherished his Camembert, and he felt obligated to them. “I don’t have a choice,” he said, “an
d there is a satisfaction in making a product that pleases consumers, a cheese that pleases amateurs.” He said that he sold his Camembert on site and at a few outdoor markets in the area. But he was a venerated figure in the world of Camembert, and he was only two hours from Paris; why weren’t three-star restaurants coming to buy his cheese? It didn’t work that way, he explained—maybe the distance was a deterrent. I said it wouldn’t be in New York; chefs there would make the drive themselves to purchase his Camembert and to encourage his efforts. For that matter, lots of frustrated lawyers would probably quit their practices and move out to the countryside to produce Camembert alongside him. Refugees from the city had played a big part in the emergence of America’s artisanal cheese movement, which was now flourishing. However, Durand and I both agreed that that sort of thing wasn’t likely to happen in France; here, your chosen career, your métier, was considered your station for life, and you definitely did not give up a well-paying job in Paris to go milk cows in Normandy. But it was unfortunate that there weren’t more people making Camembert the way he did and that he wasn’t getting more support. Durand smiled and gave a slight shrug. “Eh, oui, it is a little sad.”

  All the attention that Durand had attracted naturally gave the war over Camembert the appearance of a morality play, one pitting a pair of soulless corporate giants against a single, stalwart artisan. The way the story had been spun by the media did not please the man responsible for spinning the media on behalf of Lactalis, company spokesman Luc Morelon. He and I met one night for a drink at La Coupole, the famous art-deco brasserie on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris. Morelon, who had worked for Lactalis for sixteen years, was dressed in a rumpled blue suit, and this, combined with his unruly gray hair, suggested his day had been a long one. To hear Morelon tell it, every day had been a long one since Lactalis and Isigny Sainte-Mère had announced they would be quitting the appellation. “Lactalis is the bad guy,” he said, morosely staring down at the small plate of black olives he was demolishing. “We’re the bad guys.”

  Everything had been fine, Morelon said, until 1999, when a lab in Belgium had reported finding elevated levels of Listeria in Lepetit Camemberts. Further analysis had shown that the lab had been wrong, he said, but the French government had forced the company to recall one million wheels of the cheese, a financial and public relations disaster. Indeed, sales of Lepetit had never fully recovered. But why hadn’t the government relented after it had been shown that the initial lab results were erroneous? “We are in France; the administration is always right,” Morelon said with a sardonic laugh.

  The Réaux incident six years later caused Lactalis unpleasant flashbacks, and with the French public increasingly mindful of food safety, the company ultimately decided that it needed to treat all the milk used in its Camemberts. “We cannot take the risk of putting children in the hospital,” Morelon said. “It would be catastrophic. Raw milk may have E. coli, and that’s a fact; it’s not an invention by Lactalis. We make eighty thousand Camemberts per day in raw milk. If there is a risk of one per ten thousand, it makes eight per day. It is not acceptable for a company like Lactalis.”

  Intriguingly, Morelon suggested that the raw-milk issue was a red herring. He told me that the nature of milk had changed. Twenty years ago, raw milk typically had 200,000 to 300,000 bacteria per gram. Now, thanks to the increased hygiene standards mandated by the European Union, the milk had just 10,000 bacteria per gram, or twenty to thirty times fewer microbes, and this had completely changed Camembert production. With the old bacteria count, Morelon said, cheese makers could rely on the milk to mature itself. That was no longer the case: Nowadays, they had to use special cultures adapted to the taste of Camembert to get the milk to mature. With other cheeses, such as Roquefort, the raw milk might still matter, but it was now largely immaterial to Camembert, he said. So there was no way to tell the difference between raw-milk Camembert and Camembert made from treated milk? “I will give a taste to anyone to see if they can find the difference,” he confidently declared.

  At this point I confessed to some confusion. If there now were so many fewer bacteria in the milk, didn’t this mean the milk was safer, and if so, why did Lactalis suddenly feel the need to thermalize it? “Ah, that’s a complicated issue,” he said. He explained that when there had been many more bacteria in the milk, all those pathogens had had to fight for space, and it had created a stable environment. With fewer germs, there was less competition and more space for the bacteria to develop. “It’s a paradox of food safety,” he said. “With fewer germs, the danger may be worse.” They were able to control for salmonella and Listeria, but E. coli was still a problem, and a growing one. The Réaux incident had been caused, he said, by a new strain of E. coli 026, one that had never been seen before in dairy products. They could test all the milk, but it would take thirty hours to get the results, and that was too long; delaying the process would change the milk and the taste of the cheese. Leaving the milk untested and untreated was not an option. “It is an impossible risk for us to accept,” he said.

  He paused to say hello to a group of businessmen leaving the restaurant. “They are from our Russia plant; they are in Paris for a meeting,” he explained, helping himself to another olive. I asked him why, if all he was saying was true, the authorities didn’t just agree to amend the rules. Part of it, he said, was political: Having lectured the world about the unique quality of its raw-milk cheeses, the French government didn’t wish to appear hypocritical by giving in to Lactalis and Isigny. Here, Morelon began to mock French bureaucrats: “ ‘We have always defended raw milk in the international market. We are the champions of raw milk, and the Americans and the English don’t understand anything about cheese. As usual, we in France are the best in the world. Others have to adapt to our genius.’ ” He broke into a belly laugh.

  The other, perhaps larger, problem was that Lactalis was an industrial giant, and Morelon said there was a reflexive bias in France against corporations. “Lactalis is big,” he said with a mordant chuckle, “and the first rule in France is that small is beautiful. The second rule is, small is beautiful, and the third rule is, small is beautiful.” It didn’t matter that Lactalis produced nine thousand of the thirteen thousand tons of raw-milk Camembert made each year in Normandy; it didn’t matter that the company was offering bonuses to its seven hundred fifty milk suppliers in the appellation to shift more of their production to Norman cows. Lactalis was perceived as the enemy, and this impression had been reinforced by all the media coverage that the war over Camembert had attracted. “We’re the big giant who wants to kill the small guys, and we ’re using food safety as the tool,” he said, resuming his sardonic, slightly aggrieved tone. “It’s a nice story for the newspapers.”

  Perhaps Lactalis wasn’t trying to bury the little guys, but it plainly had an overwhelming economic advantage: It could compete a lot easier on price than a small producer like Durand, and in today’s France, price matters greatly. This was a point emphasized to me by Christian Ligeard, an official in the French Ministry of Agriculture. Ligeard was talking not about Camembert, but rather, about Roquefort and its most notorious champion, José Bové. In his view, Bové was a demagogue whose battle on behalf of Roquefort producers had been as misleading as it was misguided. What threatened their livelihoods, said Ligeard, was not globalization and free trade; it was the fact that their cheeses were simply too expensive for most French consumers. “It is not a problem to sell these cheeses; the problem is the price,” he said. “The working class here does not have the money to eat Roquefort every day. It’s like Champagne; they can maybe afford to have it on Sunday.”

  The day after my meeting with Morelon, I paid a visit to Philippe Alléosse. A sinewy forty-six-year-old with intense blue eyes, closely cut dark hair, and a radiant smile, Alléosse owned what was considered by many to be the finest cheese shop in Paris. It was located on the rue Poncelet in the seventeenth arrondissement, home to one of Paris’s most charming outdoor market
s. But Alléosse didn’t merely sell cheese; he was an affineur who bought unfinished cheeses and aged them in his own cellars. This was considered an art unto itself, and the genial Alléosse was one of its masters. He supplied a number of the city’s top restaurants, including several three-stars, and the turnover at his small eponymous shop was always brisk.

  For our meeting, Alléosse had invited me to his cave d’affinage, which was also located in the seventeenth, but at its northern edge, near the city limits. It was here that Alléosse received newly made cheeses from his network of producers and nurtured them to maturity. Before talking, he took me down to the cellar for a look (there, too, sanitary boots were obligatory). Alléosse carried one hundred fifty to two hundred different types of cheese, and the cellar normally contained around twenty thousand individual pieces, which gave the room a bracingly pungent perfume. The cellar was divided into four separate chambers, each given over to a particular family of cheeses. One room was devoted exclusively to goat cheeses. Another was for soft, surface mold—ripened cheeses, among them Camembert; a third was for hard cheeses, such as Comté; and the fourth was devoted to washed-rind cheeses, such as Muenster and Époisses. Most of the cheeses were arrayed on metal shelving racks with wheels, and as we made our way through each room, Alléosse, a man plainly in love with his work, kept pulling cheeses off the shelves and putting them under my nose. “Smell this,” “touch this,” “look at this.” My resistance finally crumbled when we arrived at the dolly containing Saint-Marcellin, a tangy, deliriously runny cow’s-milk cheese produced near Lyon. I told Alléosse of my fondness for Saint-Marcellin; he immediately handed me one of the puck-size disks, which I proceeded to scarf. It was sublime—as good a mid-morning fillip as you could ever hope to taste.