Here’s an excerpt of a story from Spiegel Online international about a failed attempt to “modernize” a classic raw French cheese by changing to pasteurized milk. This article came to our attention through a comment by Don Wittlinger on The Complete Patient blog.
The village of Camembert is tiny, and represents the ideal image many French still hold of their country. Photo Maurice Weiss/Ostkreis
“By Ullrich Fichtner
It was a typical globalization-era war that pitted tradition against profits. A large cheese factory wanted to change the Camembert recipe and began a dirty fight against small producers. This time, though, tradition emerged victorious.
When Luc Morelon was still convinced that this was a winnable war, he was willing to give interviews in his office on the 30th floor of the Montparnasse Tower, with its view of the Eiffel Tower and of a deceptively peaceful-looking sea of shimmering Parisian rooftops in the morning mist. Wearing a tie with a pattern of little colorful goats on it, Morelon, a heavy-set, white-haired man, sat at his desk facing a laptop filled with data and charts of his company, Lactalis. With 125 plants worldwide, 32,000 employees and €9.6 billion ($12.2 billion) in annual sales, Lactalis is Europe’s largest cheese producer, a global giant and a company that is easy to hate. Continue reading
The Bovine 