Fromage Fray. Small Farmers Fight Dairy Giants Over the Future of French Cheese

In his tiny workshop with a view of his cows, François Durand stood lovingly ladling raw milk curd into cheese molds. After several weeks of salting, ripening and maturing, these would turn into the pungent, oozing camembert that is France's favorite soft cheese - as much part of the national stereotype as the Basque beret, the baguette and a glass of red wine.

"When you use raw, unpasteurized milk, the taste is nice and fruity," Durand mused as he inspected the smelly contents of his ripening rooms. "You can taste what the cows have been eating at different times of year."

Durand is the last dairy farmer in the tiny Normandy village of Camembert still making traditional, raw milk camembert cheese. But the farm's visitor book hints at the bitter cheese wars that have poisoned the air of the surrounding hills and dales. "Be brave!" urges one scribbled French entry. "Keep up the fight! Thanks for defending real cheese."

For months, small cheese producers and camembert connoisseurs have been engaged in a battle with France's industrial dairy giants.

Camembert is the country's best-selling cheese after emmental, so it is not surprising that industry moved in to mass-produce it, buying up small producers and delivering vast amounts of cheaper, machine-produced camembert to supermarkets. There are only five traditional producers left of the prized "Camembert de Normandie".

Last year, the two industrial giants that produced 80% of the Normandy camembert which carried France's famous Apellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) stamp of approval decided to make most of their camembert with pasteurised rather than raw milk. They said they wanted to protect consumers' health because, when manufacturing large volumes, they could not ensure raw milk was free of dangerous bacteria. Pasteurising their milk - a process cheaper and better suited to mass-production - meant the giants could no longer carry the prized AOC label.

But they began a fight to win back the precious stamp, arguing that pasteurized cheese should be included. Last month, camembert aficionados breathed a sigh of relief when, after a long public battle, cheese authorities said they would protect small producers by reserving the AOC only for Normandy camembert made in the traditional way.

Small cheese makers say the war is not over, and the fight could be turning dirty. In recent weeks, the biggest industrial producer, Lactalis, told authorities that dangerous bacteria was found in a batch of AOC raw milk camembert produced by Reaux. The smaller company said there was no evidence of contamination. "This was an operation to destabilize us," it's a new episode in the camembert war, that's for sure," said Bertrand Gillot, Reaux's director .

"The camembert war is a symbol of the wider cheese crisis in France," warned Veroniqué Richez-Lerouge, founder of France's Regional Cheese Association, which lobbies to protect traditional raw-milk varieties.

France produces 1,000 varieties of cheese, its consumption second only to the champion cheese-eaters of Europe, the Greeks. But the problem for French purists is the type of cheese the French are eating. Raw milk cheese makes up only 15% of the market. Dozens of traditional cheese varieties have disappeared over the past 30 years as small producers die out or are bought up. The new types of cheese include squeezable, spreadable and artificially flavored varieties. Around 95% of French cheese is now bought in supermarkets, where even cheese monger counters are disappearing.

"If it continues like this, in 10 years' time traditional raw milk cheese will be over," Richez-Lerouge said. She said even in Britain where, like the US and Spain, raw milk cheese is in fashion, traditional makers were held in more esteem.

At Durand's farm, Gérard Roger, a camembert historian and president of the newly created Defence Committee for Authentic Camembert, reluctantly agreed to taste-test a mass-produced, big-selling supermarket camembert.

"Wow, it stinks," he says sniffing the pale, uniform cheese. "It's dull, it tastes of nothing." Roger's group, which has organized street demonstrations, see themselves as "guardians of the temple". Now that they have won a victory in the AOC battle for raw milk camembert, they are lobbying to protect authentic production methods.

Lactalis, the world's second-largest dairy processor, said: "We are not trying to kill off the small people. We've got better things to do." A spokesman said although the risk from raw milk was very small, the company's big brands preferred not to take it. He said there was nothing malicious in alerting the authorities to a bacteria-risk in competitor's cheese.