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After years of lobbying, industrial producers are now allowed to make camembert with pasteurised milk. As a result, one of France's beloved cheeses may be disappearing – for good.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180618-the-end-to-a-french-cheese-tradition
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The End to a French Cheese Tradition?
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It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ...
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:20PM (13 children)
I'm reading the article and trying vainly to understand how allowing product B is going to end product A. It sounds so long and convoluted as people tend to be when they try to explain why other people shouldn't be allowed to do what they want to do with their own property.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jdavidb on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:21PM (4 children)
I hate this patronizing attitude. If I as a consumer want to switch to a more cheaply made product I'm not lost. You just wish I was forced to pick you out of having no other alternative.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:28PM (3 children)
You were always allowed to choose the cheaper product. All that changed is that now the cheaper product may be sold under the same name as the more expensive product.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:51PM (1 child)
They used to have precisely that in the different label they used. Now they changed the meaning of the label to include different standards.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:40PM
Pasteurized-milk camembert tastes smells strongly of ammonia. I expect that most French people will not want to spend money on that, given the breadth of choices.
For export (like to the US), people with no choice will just get the inferior product with the known name.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:50PM (4 children)
Basically, because the raw milk process is more temperamental and thus more expensive/labor intensive. Before, producers who used this traditional method could label their cheeses in a different way, which allowed consumers to understand the difference in production, and thus perhaps understand the reason for the higher price.
Exactly where was this? Who was not "allowed to do what they want to do with their own property"??
The industrial producers who used pasteurized milk were certainly able to make cheese with it. And they were able to sell it. The only thing that was restricted was what they were legally able to label it as. That's not about an individual's rights to do what they want -- that's about a community's rights to know what they're buying in the public marketplace.
Personally, I find some of these "source of food/production" labels to be silly too. But if a local community/country chooses to regulate who can use said labels, I don't have a problem with it. I can certainly choose to buy "camembert" cheese made in Canada if I like, as TFA notes. As a consumer, I still get all the choices -- French cheese that's pasteurized, French cheese that's unpasteurized, Canadian cheese, etc. It's just about who is allowed to claim their cheese is made in the "traditional" manner.
For example, pizza napoletana has all sorts of regulations governing its proper manufacture if you want to claim that you're making "true" Neapolitan pizza. Restrictions governing ingredients, oven temperature (both air and oven floor), maximum time for bake, etc. The process creates a unique product, one which I happen to like, and which I really enjoyed while visiting Naples.
Given the propensity for Italian businesses to try to "relieve" tourists of their money wherever possible, it's nice that one can actually see whether a particular eatery is registered and thus producing pizza in the traditional manner. You can certainly choose to eat at a different pizzeria that produces a different style of pizza if you like. It might be cheaper. It's up to you. The label is just providing information about the product.
In essence, the pasteurized cheese producers here wanted permission from a governing body to use a special certified label on their product when offering it for public sale. It has to do with potential misrepresentation of a product, or the accepted definition of a product. Now the definition of the product has been changed and the information it used to convey is thus altered
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:30PM (2 children)
Their labeling machine is their own property, is it not?
Here in the glorious freepublic of ancapistan, I am free to grow my own destroying angel mushrooms in my own shit, saturate them with my own antifreeze, package them in my own shrinkwrap machine, label them "100% Authentic Camembert Cheese, Made In The Most Traditional Process" with my own labeling machine, and take them to the Free Market to sell.
The rest of you must wish you had such freedom to do as you like with your own property.
After all, if people didn't want antifreeze-laden poison mushrooms, why, they shouldn't have bought them!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:57PM
Ancapistan is BEST Libertopia!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @10:41PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @06:33AM
Thanks for the clear analysis.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
The issue is what they're allowed to call what they make.
They've been allowed to call this mass produced cheese made from pasteurized Holstein milk as 'Camembert cheese' for a long time, yet there's a very good argument that it's not Camembert cheese at all, at most it's a cheap 'Camembert style' of cheese, but not the real thing.
In a perfect world consumers would see through such things but in the real world it does seem to cause measurable confusion, and market distortions result.
I'm not taking a side, I just don't think it's accurate to say this is about what they're allowed to make, rather than what they're allowed to call what they make.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:37PM
To be clear, according to TFA, "Camembert" cheese is now produced around the world. The particular dispute in this case is that "Camembert de Normandie" was a restricted designation which denoted specific production methods. Cheesemakers in Normandy who refused to adhere to these restrictions instead put "Fabriqué en Normandie" on their labels. Justifiably, some of the "Camembert de Normandie" cheesemakers -- only about 10% of the overall production from Normandy -- thought this was confusing to consumers, but those "in the know" still could find the kind of cheese they wanted.
The concern here was not only over pasteurization, but also over some other aspects of the cheesemaking process, and particularly the use of Normande cows, which produce a richer milk with a different flavor profile. Most of the industrial producers who use pasteurized milk also just use Holstein or other cows that are bred to produce more milk more quickly and easily. (Holstein milk, even though it's the standard in the U.S., is generally pretty bland, and has become blander over the years as Holsteins are bred to produce ridiculous quantities of milk per cow these days.)
The compromise that was made here is that the folks who manage the "Camembert de Normandie" designation wanted to preserve some of the flavor of the overall cheese that comes from their region, I guess. So, they compromised by allowing pasteurization and the use of the "Camembert de Normandie" designation as long as the dairies who use that designation agree to use Normande cows.
So, a distinctive cow breed will likely be preserved better, and perhaps the overall flavor of "camembert" coming out of Normandy will improve because of it. But some other traditional elements (the unpasteurized processing) will be lost as a required component of the "Camembert de Normandie" designation.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:41PM
I didn't take it that way. It was more about the right to use a name. Do whatever you want making cheese, but if you're going to say it's type A cheese, then it better damn well be type A cheese.
After reading the article, my take away was that the name was the objection. To use the name the milk must come from specific cows raised in a specific place, and it may not be pasteurized. That's what has changed, and as a result, the cheese itself will change. Raw milk will be used less and less as Big Ag takes over, which means that Camembert cheese will no longer be Camembert cheese. At least technically.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.