Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  In the world of French gastronomy, Ducasse cut a singular figure and so did Jacques Puisais. Now in his eighties, he was an oenologist and writer who had devoted his career to promoting discernment at the table. He wanted his compatriots to eat knowledgeably, correctly, and well, and had even established an organization called the Institute of Taste to help spread the gospel of good food. He was France’s philosopher of flavor, continuing a tradition of culinary high-mindedness that stretched back to Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de la Reynière. Given that McDonald’s now seemed to be undoing his life’s work, I expected to receive an earful of Olympian thunderclaps when I phoned Puisais at his home in the Loire Valley to talk about the fast-food colossus. After all, this was a man who had told the Times of London, in response to a study showing that the French were forsaking croissants for cold cereals, that corn flakes were “a miserable product, consumed in solitude, lending a depressing inhumanity to the morning meal.”

  But like Ducasse, Puisais wasn’t inclined to view the success of McDonald’s as an indictment of the French or a sign of the apocalypse; it was simply a reflection of the changed circumstances in which people now lived and worked. In his judgment, fast food was an expression of the modern condition, and France was a modern country. “Eating well takes lots of time, but we live very quickly now—that’s the way of the world,” he said. In fact, he respected what McDonald’s had achieved in France, and recognized that it provided a vital service. If office workers were only given fifteen minutes for lunch, they needed to patronize establishments that could get them in and out in a hurry. In bistros, it sometimes took fifteen minutes just to get the menu. But while he understood the appeal of McDonald’s, he couldn’t accept the notion that a meal there was a dining experience; even if you lingered at the table for an hour and finished up with an espresso and a macaron, it was still fast food. “McDonald’s is a place one eats, but it is not a restaurant,” Puisais said emphatically. “There is no wine, there are no vegetables, there is no gastronomic discourse. One cannot truly eat in fifteen minutes.”

  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. A few people tried to raise public awareness and rally support for the embattled cheeses. In 2006, an organization called the Association Fromages de Terroirs, which aimed to call attention to endangered lait cru cheeses, mounted a very Gallic PR campaign: It came out with a calendar of lingerie-clad women called From’ Girls, with each month’s model named in tribute to a particular cheese. Mademoiselle January, for instance, was Barbara Munster, while October was given over to Estelle Livarot. The brainchild of the association’s founder, former journalist Véronique Richez-Lerouge (who posed as Éléanore de Mont d’Or, Mademoiselle December), the calendar generated some amused headlines, but it didn’t seem to energize consumers. When the 2008 calendar was released, the From’ Girls evidently felt more drastic measures were called for: The new pages were filled with exposed breasts and bottoms.

  By 2008, the situation had become desperate, for it was no longer just esoteric cheeses that faced an uncertain future. Now, the most popular fromage of all, Camembert, was under threat. In March 2007, Lactalis and Isigny Sainte-Mère, the two companies that together accounted for 90 percent of all the raw-milk Camembert produced in France, announced that they would be dropping out of the Camembert appellation unless the rules were changed to permit them to treat the milk they used. Citing an incident in 2005, in which several schoolchildren fell ill after eating lait cru Camembert made by Réaux, a producer in western Normandy, the two firms claimed that health concerns on the part of the French public obliged them to begin thermalizing their milk. Thermalization was a gentler form of pasteurization. There were two ways of pasteurizing milk—the long way and the slow way. The former involved heating it at 150 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 to 40 minutes, the latter required heating it at 161 degrees for 15 to 20 seconds. With thermalization, the milk was heated to 150 degrees and kept there for only about 15 seconds—enough time to destroy many of the pathogens that might be swimming around but not all of them. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t consider this an adequate precaution and categorized cheeses made this way as raw-milk products. The European Union, on the other hand, treated such cheeses as pasteurized. Whether thermalized milk was fertile ground for dangerous microorganisms was a matter of dispute; it was unquestionably fertile ground for controversy.

  Lait cru Camembert now accounted for less than 10 percent of the Camembert produced in France. But aficionados like Richez-Lerouge considered it to be the truest representation of Camembert and the only kind worth eating. They also believed that there was much more at stake than the fate of this one, wildly popular cheese; in their view, the future of all raw-milk cheeses was on the line. To lose a delicious but little-known variety like Vacherin d’Abondance was a tragedy, but one with limited fallout; to see raw-milk Camembert disappear would be a catastrophe for French cuisine and the French nation. Camembert was France’s national cheese—the most cele
brated cheese that she produced, a cheese whose history was said to be intertwined with that of modern France. “Camembert is a subject that unites all of France,” François Mitterrand once said. Some two hundred years earlier, Brillat-Savarin had expressed similar sentiments in verse:

  Camembert, poetry,

  Bouquet of our meals,

  What would become life,

  If you did not exist?

  It now appeared that France was in danger of finding out.

  Legend has it that Camembert was invented in 1791 by a woman named Marie Harel, who supposedly lived in the village of Camembert, in the Pays d’Auge area of Normandy, with the help of a refractory priest on the run from the revolutionary authorities. The priest, the story goes, was from the Brie region and was given refuge in the Harel household. During his stay there, he shared his recipe for making Brie with Harel, who placed the Brie in a small mold used to produce another local cheese, Livarot, and thus was born Camembert. That its birth supposedly coincided with the birth of modern France had the effect of draping Camembert in the tricolor flag, and the involvement of a priest fleeing persecution gave the story an added cloak of religiosity—indeed, even suggested a touch of divine intervention.

  The legend behind Camembert remained a local, and largely forgotten, one until 1926, when an American doctor named Joseph Knirim traveled to the village of Vimoutiers, a few kilometers from Camembert, to pay tribute to Marie Harel for inventing the cheese that he believed had saved his life. Knirim was not very adept at speaking French. To make sure his message was understood, he carried a document written in French, which he handed to the town’s deputy mayor. It read,

  France possesses many cheeses, all of which are excellent, but when it comes to digestibility, Madame Harel’s cheese, the “veritable Norman Camembert,” is surely the best. Years ago, I suffered for several months from indigestion, and Camembert was practically the sole nourishment that my stomach and intestines were able to tolerate. Since then, I have sung the praises of Camembert. I have introduced it to thousands of gourmets, and I myself eat it two or three times a day … In humble expression of my great admiration for Camembert cheese, which is shared by thousands of friends in the United States, I have brought with me across the waters this wreath of flowers to lay on the monument of our common benefactress. May the French and American flags be forever united in the service of mankind.

  Pierre Boisard, author of the book Camembert: A National Myth, says that the deputy mayor knew of Harel but had no idea where she was buried; she was a footnote in local history (and, it would later turn out, a dubious one). But he and the mayor recognized the potential PR bonanza that Knirim had dropped in their laps and immediately set about exploiting it. The timing couldn’t have been more propitious. Just two months earlier, a French court had ruled that Camembert was now a generic name and that Normandy had no special claim to it; Knirim’s fantastical story, and the long journey he had made to tell it, offered a chance for the Normans to reinforce their claim to the now wildly popular cheese. Knirim’s pilgrimage made headlines across France, and on April 11, 1928, in a ceremony attended by former French president Alexandre Millerand, a statue of Harel was unveiled in Vimoutiers, enshrining her as the creator of Camembert. “The cheese’s official celebration by a former president of the Republic gave birth to a modern national myth in which Camembert was to become intricately associated with France itself,” writes Boisard. “Since that day, Camembert has become France’s foremost cheese, and France has become the country of Camembert.”

  There was just one problem: Harel was not Camembert’s inventor, and the evidence suggests that she didn’t even live in the village of Camembert. In reality, Camembert was being made and consumed nearly a century before Harel supposedly created it. Likewise, while she may well have hidden a recusant priest, there is no reason to believe that a cleric on the lam played any part in Camembert’s birth. Based on his own research and the work of other historians, Boisard believes that Harel was simply a Norman housewife who made an especially fetching Camembert, one that acquired local renown both because of its quality and because she was an unusually commercial-minded producer and sold her cheese in several different area markets. She passed along her cheese-making skills and entrepreneurial flair to her five children, all of whom went into the Camembert business. It was through her descendants that the myth of Harel was propagated. Facing increased competition in the mid-1800s, the Harel clan spun the story that its matriarch had been Camembert’s creator and that they, as recipients of both her bloodlines and her recipe, were the only producers making true Camembert.

  But what was true Camembert? As Boisard notes, for the first century of Camembert’s existence, there was no generally accepted method of making it; recipes were personal and private, and every producer gave the cheese his or her own twist. As Camembert’s renown grew and its sales soared during the latter half of the nineteenth century, its manufacture spread to other regions of France. In 1909, Camembert producers in Normandy banded together to form an organization called the Syndicat des Fabricants du Véritable Camembert de Normandie, whose objective was to have Camembert officially declared a protected name, applicable only to those Camemberts that originated in Normandy. But because Camembert hadn’t been around all that long (Roquefort, for example, dated back to Roman times), and because there was not yet a consensus about how and exactly where it should be made (was only the Pays d’Auge acceptable, or could real Camembert be made elsewhere in Normandy?), the syndicate’s claim to exclusivity was repeatedly rebuffed. In January 1926, just three months before Joseph Knirim’s pilgrimage to Vimoutiers, a court in the city of Orléans tossed out a lawsuit that the SFVCN had brought against a dairy in the Loire Valley for allegedly producing inauthentic Camembert. In rendering its verdict, the court decreed that Camembert had become a generic name and had no geographical significance. Successive French governments, wary of harming dairy interests elsewhere in the country and unwilling to take measures that might cause Camembert prices to rise, likewise rejected the Norman claims.

  In 1968, the syndicate finally made some headway when it was granted the right to place a label saying “Véritable Camembert de Normandie” on Camemberts produced in Normandy. Fifteen years later, the French government reversed policy and agreed to officially recognize Camembert’s Norman roots by granting appellation (AOC) status to raw-milk, ladle-molded Camembert produced in the part of the Pays d’Auge that included the town of Camembert. The edict didn’t prohibit cheese makers in other regions and other countries from using the name “Camembert”; it merely gave this small zone in and around the town of Camembert exclusive right to the name “Camembert de Normandie” and stipulated that only cheeses fabricated in this area, made from local milk, and molded by ladle were entitled to that designation.

  The irony is that raw-milk, ladle-molded Camembert was by then virtually obsolete. Over the previous three decades, surging demand and technological advances had turned the fabled cheese into a factory product, made in mechanized fashion from pasteurized milk. A few artisans continued to churn out the real, old-fashioned stuff, but they were a steadily dwindling minority. So how was it that their outmoded Camembert was granted AOC status? Surprisingly, much of the credit belonged to Michel Besnier, whose eponymous company did more than any other to industrialize Camembert’s production and standardize its taste. Besnier’s father, André, had started the firm in 1933. Michel took over in 1955, when the company had 55 employees and was turning out around 4,000 Camemberts per day. At the time of his death, in 2000, it had grown to be the second-largest dairy group in Europe, with 15,000 employees and $6.6 billion in annual turnover. (It is now the largest, with 35,000 employees spread over 125 production facilities in 23 countries.) By then, it was manufacturing 240 million Camemberts annually, most of them under its Président label. Started by Besnier in 1968, Président was one of the first pasteurized Camemberts and among the first brands to be distributed nationally. Besnier took p
ride in its bland reliability, boasting that Président Camemberts were “uniform and better adapted to wide distribution. In supermarkets, our pasteurized-milk Camemberts stand up better in refrigerator sections. They change less after they have been packaged.” But according to Boisard, when the syndicate, after winning approval for the “Véritable Camembert” label, pushed to have raw-milk, hand-ladled Camembert awarded appellation status, Besnier threw his support behind the effort because he had grown up in Normandy and “was still sentimentally attached to the Camembert of his childhood.” Later, Besnier would acquire two lait cru Camembert producers, Lepetit and Lanquetot, which were still in the company’s hands in 2007.

  But by then, the company was no longer called Besnier. In 1999, it had been rechristened Lactalis—the same Lactalis that, along with Isigny Sainte-Mère, was now threatening to quit the appellation unless the rules were amended to permit thermalized milk.

  On a cold, sunny December morning, I drove out to Normandy to visit the village of Camembert and a local cheese maker, François Durand, who had been featured in newspaper articles around the world as the plucky artisan standing firm against the forces of alimentary industrialization. Camembert was located several hours west of Paris, in an area of lush, gently rolling hills not far from Deauville and the Normandy coastline. It turned out there wasn’t actually a village in Camembert, however: The town, such as it was, consisted of a tiny, forlorn city hall, a small museum dedicated to Camembert, and a cluster of farms. Its population was said to be around two hundred, but from the looks of things, that figure was the result of some generous rounding-up.