Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger

Author:Michael Steinberger [Steinberger, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-67326-6
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2009-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

The Raw and the Cooked

IN THE MONTHS PRECEDING the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, relations between the United States and France turned testier than at any time since the end of the Second World War. The French refusal to back the overthrow of Saddam Hussein prompted an outpouring of vitriol in the United States. French wines were shunned, French fries were hilariously renamed freedom fries in several congressional cafeterias, and an anti-French epithet, coined several years earlier by that well-known foreign policy wise man, Groundskeeper Willie of The Simpsons, entered the global lexicon. In one episode of the show, he had referred to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and his colorful phrase was invoked, to equally widespread delight and opprobrium, by right-wing American commentators eager to stoke the public’s anger.

Although it expressed an ugly sentiment, the phrase was unquestionably catchy, and it was partly grounded in truth: Historically, the French were a nation of cheese eaters. Roquefort, Brie, Pont-l’Évêque: These were names as synonymous with France as Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Jerry Lewis. The French ate prodigious quantities of cheese and fabricated a dizzying array of them—enough, it was claimed, so that a person could eat a different cheese every day of the year. Charles de Gaulle’s famous quip—“How can you govern a country which has two hundred forty-six varieties of cheese?”—underscored not only the tumultuousness of French politics, but also the importance of cheese to French culture.

But four decades after de Gaulle invoked cheese to express his frustration at trying to lead his recalcitrant compatriots, something peculiar and awful was happening: Many French cheeses were in danger of extinction. In fact, a number of them had already been lost. All were raw-milk, or lait cru, cheeses—real cheeses, in the view of connoisseurs, who believed that pasteurization denuded the flavor of cheese. (Pasteurization involves heating freshly drawn milk in order to kill any viruses, bacteria, or other microorganisms—the same microorganisms that are believed to impart character and complexity to cheeses.) Although the United States prohibited the importation of raw-milk cheeses aged for fewer than sixty days (by which point, it was assumed, the pathogens would be dead), lait cru had been the tradition in France for centuries, one that was steadfastly maintained even with the advent of pasteurization in the mid-1800s.

But now, these cheeses were threatened. At first, the endangered ones were names generally known only to the most passionate aficionados. There was, for instance, Vacherin d’Abondance, a cow’s-milk cheese made in the Alps. In 2005, the last person producing it, a septuagenarian named Célina Gagneux, decided to hang up her ladle and smock, and a two-hundred-year-old cheese quietly disappeared. The same fate had befallen dozens of other cheeses since the 1970s, and more were now said to be in jeopardy. By the mid-2000s raw-milk varieties accounted for barely 10 percent of all the cheese produced in France, down from virtually one hundred percent a half-century earlier. An essential part of France’s gastronomic heritage and culinary ecology was at risk, yet most French seemed unaware of or indifferent to the plight of these cheeses.

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