Ah, America! Raw Milk - The Fight Heats Up

In his recent article, Who Took My Raw Milk Cheese?, David Gumpert discussed the politics and reasons behind the FDA raids on respected cheese makers in several states.  As a journalist, he is the author of The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights (Chelsea Green, 2009) and his blog documents the on-going battle over raw milk. 

From where I sit here in France, this is a pretty sorry story for the naissant US artisanal cheese business. France as the mother of all raw milk cheeses has it's problems too!  As recently as two years ago, big agro tried to get the EU to ban raw milk Camembert using the listeria argument. Historically however, in France these listeriosis alerts have been traced back to contamination at the source of production and in almost all cases, were from cheeses produced in industrial factories using pasturised milk.   

But here, all raw milk cheeses must comply with the health standards of European regulations concerning micro-organisms and hygiene.  According to statistics, the health risks associated with consumption of raw milk products are very limited if you compare the small number of listeriosis alerts that have occurred when compared with an annual production that exceeds more than 170,000 tonnes in France according to the researchers at the INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (France) otherwise known as the National Institute for Agricultural Research) in Clermont-Ferrand-Theix.

In an article by Pete Kennedy from the Farmer To Consumer Legal Defense Fund, FDA's Ace in the Hole, in the last thirty-eight years, there have been no reports of illness caused by the consumption of raw milk that was attributed to Listeria monocytogenes (L-mono).  One must ask why then is the FDA all of a sudden targeting small farm producers?  Reminds me of the UK in the 1970's, and the E-coli 0157 scare.  James Aldridge's wonderful artisanal cheese Tornegus was targeted by the then public health minister Tessa Jowell because of a suspected illness and his triving business was promplty destroyed.

As in the case of James Aldridge, the American farmers are being required to destroy their cheese, thus their livelihood.  The most disturbing bit here is that the FDA is only using a test to discover the presence listeria bacteria (which by the way is on your hands at this very moment) and not the one that drills down to find the specific form and quantity. I read that in the case of the Morningland Diary, 100 swabs at the dairy found no indication of presence the bacteria; however, the FDA is not publishing their results. It is like being condemned of a crime without actual proof.

  

If you are interested in the subject of biopolitics, I highly recommend you read the research paper by Heather Paxton at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - POST-PASTEURIAN CULTURES: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States, published in CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, 2008.  And further reading on the raw milk issue, you might try the Research report : Food Fears and Raw-milk Cheese by Harry G. West for the Food Studies Centre, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, 2008.

But by all means, please judge for yourself. I have been eating raw milk cheeses here in France every day for 20 years and am still alive and kicking!  Buy your cheese, raw milk or otherwise, from a quality fromagerie who source the best quality cheeses from the best producers; keep the properly and enjoy them safely.

An update : For those of you who what to keep posted on the latest developements on this story.  Two articles in the International Herald Tribune, November 19 & 20 2010...A matter of taste versus safety and As Cheesemaking Blooms, So Can Listeria both by William Neuman and there is an interesting video on the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese.

Update 30 November 2010 : Senate Passes Overhaul of Food Safety Regulations

Fighting that Fat! Cheese on the front line?

The other day I was surfing the web regarding weight  because in my role as a fromologue, people constantly insist that cheese is fattening and bad for you. Since I eat a vast quantity of the stuff and other dairy products, don't do that much exercise except if you consider walking to the métro in Paris, have pretty low cholesteral and am not considered even vaguely fat, I am always looking for scientific evidence to fortify my argruments as well as my personal evidence to the contrary. 

 

So imagine my glee when I stumbled across this article regarding a study from 2004 which indicates that honest to goodness real, unadulterated diary products should not be considered necessarily fattening and, to the contrary, possess a lot of benefits especially for those who are obese. According to the articles I read following the subject, "getting enough calcium in your diet seems to stimulates the body to burn more fat and reduces the amount of new fat the body makes" per Dr. Michael Zemel, a professor of nutrition at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a pioneer in this emerging area of research on the relationship between calcium and weight management.

Whoa! Gotta love that, but what is going on here? Apparently, researchers found overweight people who consumed 3 servings a day of calcium-rich dairy lost more belly fat than those who followed a similar diet with less of the dairy servings. To further emphasize the point, they found that calcium supplements didn't work as well the real deal! According to the good doctor, a diet low in calcium appears to stimulate the production of fat-producing enzymes and decreases the activity of enzymes that break down fat. "The moral of the calcium story is to not dump dairy when you're dieting...as it can help make your weight lost efforts easier," Zemel said.  

A note of caution however as this does not give people the license to go wild and over-indulge in dairy products hoping to generate weight loss. Helas! As we have always known, there is no gain (or loss in this case!) without some pain. In otherwords, you still have to burn more calories than you take in; eating properly and doing some exercise on top of that doesn't do any harm either. Still it's nice to know that eating all those diary products, in my case my cheese addiction, isn't killing me and could actually be helping keep those love handles under control!  Here's a link to one of the articles. 

Domaines & Terroirs Updates

Back at the ranch, we have been very busy updating our site and our tours with a new home page, a sublime tour to Alsace and some short breaks in and around Paris.
 

- Alsace is home of Munster, fabulous wines, artisanal beers, fois gras  and la Cérémonie des Fromages by Bernard Antony at his käs-kaller in Vieux Ferette.

- Paris features several half day seminar/tours like visiting our favourite cheesemongers, creating a cheese board, and a trip to Rungis as well as two new trips - a day trip to Philippe Olivier's Fromagerie in Boulogne-sur-Mer and an overnight trip to la Cérémonie des Fromages by Bernard Antony in Vieux Ferette as well.
 
Have a look at Domaines & Terroirs and let us know what you think!  

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."  - T. S. Eliot, 1942

Terroirs and Nationalities

If cheese, wine and other food stuffs have terroir which defines their nature relative to the place they arise from, could one say that people's nationality is similar to terroir? I have pondered this question ever since I moved to France - Paris to be exact, then the United Kingdom - London and then back again to Paris. Were the French like a big intense Époisses, the English like a West Country Cheddar and us Americans like…Velveeta?  

Living and working in France and the UK, across Europe and in the Emirates, I came across many different cultural styles and just like terroir, began to attribute certain characteristic behaviour to each of them. I never saw the French as rude and arrogant, probably because to me, their comportment was specific to their surroundings. They were direct and straight-forward; extremely dynamic. Okay they could be contentious but they were always intensely committed to what they believed. For me, they and their motivations were totally understandable (even though speaking French) and accessible.  

When I moved to the UK, I thought, wow, now I will be able to understand everything that's going on because of course, they speak English…well this proved to be typical expat thinking and a big trap because although the language is English, it is spoken or rather delivered in an extremely different manner. A great deal of communication in the UK and specifically England is subtext and non-verbal. This attribute proved to render understanding anything that was going on there (even in a language in which I was fluent) more difficult and sometimes downright incomprehensible.  

The Emirates were even more fascinating. The working echelons, like any wine or cheese were certainly the product of their own culture but having been shipped off at 18 or 19 to the UK or the US, they acquired another terroir as it were. They were capable of displaying their own cultural terroir, Arabic culture, as well as the veneer of the acquired occidental culture, separately, intermingled or intermittently at will. To deal with this was intriguing and a very slippery slope and strained my theory of terroir and nationality a bit.  

To explain what I had learned to my colleagues in America, the terroir analogy was a bit of a stretch, so another one worked better. What does NO mean to each of these cultures? In my dealings with Germans, it quite simply meant no, not possible. To the English, no meant 'oh sorry, not certain but could be nice'. To the French, no means no - but, i.e., if you can convince me you and your argument are worthy, it could change to yes. To the Italians, no always meant 'anything is possible bella, so let's have lunch and we'll work it out'. In the Emirates, no meant absolutely nothing, no is the beginning of a negotiation. Although simplistic, this always helped bewildered and flustered American colleagues.  

I was recently asked to write an article on the subject of cultural differences between the French and Americans for The American Magazine, published in the United Kingdom. Instead of cheese references, I found another one more relevant and rather amusing. If you are interested, here is the link to the article Smile - We're all Cats and Dogs  

Bees, Honey and Terroir

In the middle of August Paris is deserted. The last of the stressed out Parisians have left for les vacances and lots of the city is closed leaving us diehard residents to flâner in a ghost town. And so a little bored this weekend, we were roaming around and happened upon this most interesting shop in a fascinatingly time warped area of the 13éme arrondissement, La Butte aux Caille. Almost like Montmartre or rue Mouffetard in the 5th but original, uncrowded and thankfully a bit too plebeian for the menace of the colonizing bobos.

Not something I would have gone in search of but here under a threatening sky, albeit plant based we discovered another form of produits de terroirs. In this tiny shop called Les Abeilles  (the Bees) fresh from les ruches (beehives) were honeys of all sorts, from mel à la tireuse (honey by the pull), named mille fleurs (mixed flower) to miel de cru (single flower vintage honey), beeswax, beeswax candles; soaps and every thing related to the practice of apiculture. The owner Monsieur Jean-Jacques Schakmundès says honey is one of the last pure products on earth, one that comes 'direct from the producer - the bee to - us, the consumer; one that undergoes no treatment, no form of transformation and no additives'. And this being France, honey is subject to strict controls, so it is as pure as if you went out in the fields and collected it yourself.

Terroirs! Well, of course, cheese has it so why not honey too! And just like wine and cheese, honey has its own vocabulary and some even have an AOP designation (Appellation d'origine protégée) as well. Honeys are described by colour, texture, taste and provenance. Each honey, just light wines, has a provenance, while the colours depend exclusively on the origin of the flowers the bees are pollinating. The rule of thumb says that the clearer and lighter the colour, the milder the honey will be; the darker more amber the colour, the more full bodied or spicy the honey will be.

We learned that the textures are different as well, some are light and creamy others are dense and stiff. And when it comes to the texture, all honeys are liquid when they come out of the hive, the textures varying from liquid to creamy and thick to firm. All of them will cystallize at their own rate according the varietal, but a crystallized honey has the same taste and therapeutic values as those that are still liquid.  And wow is it healthy!

Suffice it to say besides falling prey to an enormous slice of Pain d'épices to take home with us, after we sampled five or six of the most exotic single cru honeys, we walked out with four amazing specimens : two light, golden ones - Néflier (from the Medlar tree) and Bois de Cuir (from the Leatherwood tree) and two dark copper ones - Chêne (oak) and Sarrazin (buckwheat flower).

Here is some of the descriptors for French honey:  
Colour : blanc (white), crème clair (clear cream), ambré trés pâle (pale amber), ambré clair (clear amber), ambré (amber), roux (red), ocre pâle (pale ocre), brun soutenu (deep brown) 

Texture : fluid, creamy, thick, firm 

Taste : trés doux (very mild), doux et parfumé (mild and fragrant), trés parfumé (very fragrant), délicat (delicate), soutenu (pungent), fort (strong), corsé (spicy), légère amertune en fin bouche (lightly bitter long note)

Les Abeilles French honey : 

Acacia mild flavour is liquid, clear and does not crystallize Provenance : all regions of France  

Amandier (almond tree) is deep brown, creamy in texture and spicy with a light bitter after taste Provenance: Vaucluse
Châtaignier (Chestnut tree) is dark brown in colour and extremely liquid, it is strong and spicy with a light bitter after taste. Provenance : Cévennes 

Eucalyptus (eucalyptus) is pale ocre colour, creamy in texture and pungent in taste. Provenance : Corse, Andalousie  

Fleur d'oranger et d'autres agrumes (orange blossoms and other citrus fruits) is clear amber, very creamy and very fragrant. Provenance : Spain and Corsica (mandarin)  

Garrigue et de montagne (honey scrub and mountain flowers) depends on the provenance of the flowers. It is generally liquid in texture, very fragrant and deep red. Provenance : Languedoc  

Lavande de Provence (lavender) is cream coloured and very fragrant with a slightly granular Provenance : Drôme, Vaucluse  

Sarrasin ou blé noir (buckwheat) is deep brown in colour, spicy and thick. Provenance: Brittany  

Trèfle (clover) is a white honey with a creamy texture and very mild flavour. Provenance: all regions  

Les Abeilles
21, rue de la Butte-aux-Cailles
75013 Paris
Téléphone : +33 (0)1 45 81 43 48
Métro "Place d'Italie" ou "Corvisart