A warning in the land of gourmets and Francophiles: after the black rhino and the snow leopard, Camembert and Roquefort are on the brink of extinction. The cause: a narrow selection of the strains of fungi used to culture the cheeses has been reproduced through an asexual, standardised process —to the point of exhaustion. Could cheese be a metaphor for our humanity adrift?
To understand how this tragedy came about, it’s important to understand the production process that allows these two jewels of French cheese-making expertise to come into the world. To produce Camembert, made from cow’s milk, or Roquefort, made from sheep’s milk, the milk has to be inoculated with very specific fungi: Penicillium camemberti for Camembert, and, logically, Penicillium roqueforti for Roquefort. The presence of these fungi in the milk will transform it and allow it—under the watchful eye of man who monitors the natural process—to develop the fine flavours that will then, after a long evolution, charm the fine palates of gourmets.
The problem is that these little creatures called Penicillia camemberti and roqueforti are rare and fragile.
In the case of P. roqueforti, only four populations of this species of fungus are known in the world. Two ‘wild’ populations are involved in the rotting of fruit and the decomposition of certain foods, and two populations are used in cheese-making, explain the French researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, or Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) who studied the subject.
Of the two domesticated populations, one is used only by producers of the Roquefort Protected Designation of Origin (PDO)—in short, the real Roqueforts recognised by cheese lovers—while all the other blue cheeses (and in particular the mass-produced blue cheeses for supermarkets) are inoculated with a single strain of P. roqueforti.
Over the years, this strain has been the fungus of choice of numerous food manufacturers, who have been keen to adapt it to their commercial requirements: to grow quickly to improve profitability, not to give the cheese too strong a taste, or too ‘mouldy’ an appearance… In a way, they needed to produce gastronomically correct cheeses quickly and easily. As a result, the microorganisms used to make so-called ‘blue’ or ‘blue-veined’ cheeses have been considerably depleted. Jeanne Ropars, a researcher in genetics and evolutionary ecology, describes what has happened as follows:
“What has happened to microorganisms is what happens every time we select organisms, large or small, [for reproduction] too drastically: it has led to a very sharp reduction in their genetic diversity. With microorganisms in particular, producers didn’t realise that they had selected a single individual and that this was not sustainable in the long term.”
As a result, the poor, over-reproduced fungi are now at the end of their tether and are having great difficulty fulfilling their mission of transforming good milk into good cheese.
The problem has been compounded by another impoverishing factor: the choice of how the fungi reproduce. A fungus can reproduce in two ways—as you probably didn’t know, and neither did I—one sexual, the other asexual. To save themselves the trouble of unpleasant setbacks, industrial producers have systematically favoured so-called asexual reproduction for their fungi, i.e., cloning a single line of origin, which is easier to control and guarantees the production of a cheese with no surprises. After a certain period of time, micro-organisms duplicated in this way can no longer reproduce with other strains that could provide them with new genetic material. They become sterile and degenerate.
Producers of PDO Roquefort cheese fare a little better, as they have managed to maintain a minimum of vitality in their fungi by preserving traditional production techniques. The industrial companies, on the other hand, have reached a dead end.
The situation for Camembert is even more serious. All over the world, Camembert cheese now owes its existence to a single strain of Penicillium camemberti—a white mutant selected in 1898 to inoculate Bries and then Camemberts. This single strain has been replicated without interruption ever since. In the 1950s, it underwent an even more drastic reduction, when industrialists preferred its albino variant, to guarantee a clean, smooth Camembert. Until then, Camembert cheese could sometimes show grey, green, or even orange mould, which was eventually deemed unacceptable by consumers in search of standardisation and hygiene. Today, the poor strain is literally exhausted, and Camembert manufacturers are finding it extremely difficult to obtain sufficient quantities of spores to inoculate their milk and guarantee their production. Camembert is well and truly on the way out.
It’s all very regrettable, you may say, but after all, it’s only cheese. As a good French citizen, I’d say that you simply can’t say in good conscience and without shame that it’s only about cheese. Cheese is life, and life is cheese. And on closer inspection, there are a few cheese-related lessons to be learned from the misadventures of Roquefort and Camembert.
Impose standardised products. Reject the unexpected, and anything that grows in a heterodox and unforeseen manner. Abandon natural, sexual reproduction and its surprises in favour of controlled, chemical reproduction that denies sexual difference—the primary source of all diversity and variation. The result is a disenchanted and mortifying world that has lost all its flavour. Doesn’t that remind you of something? You certainly know what I mean.
Fortunately for mankind and cheese lovers, nature is full of resources, and CNRS researchers tell us that salvation may lie in Termignon blue cheese. This little blue cheese, made in a confidential, traditional, and artisanal way in the Alps, is said to contain a hitherto unknown strain of P. roqueforti, which is capable of regenerating fungi saturated with bad mutations that are now incapable of producing cheese, and thus relaunching the production of French blue cheeses.
If we’re being metaphorical, it’s up to us Conservatives to be the Termignon blue cheeses of our time: the essential fertile, well-hidden ferment that people will come looking for when our exhausted modern world no longer has any taste.
