Inside France's Cheese War

A two-year battle among French producers over the recipe for genuine Camembert cheese has finally ended—and the traditionalists won

By Ullrich Fichtner

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.

He had had a grueling year as the spokesman for Lactalis. Now it was winter again and Morelon, the company's powerful director in charge of communication and disinformation, had gotten used to playing the role of villain. He curtly rejected the first few requests for an interview, writing, without the customary niceties and French flourishes, that he was no longer available for further attacks by the "self-proclaimed custodians of tradition," and that he was tired of listening to the chants of "the small against the big" and the constant talk of a "Camembert war."

But it is a war. Or at least it was one until recently, when it ended with a total capitulation, a humiliating defeat for Morelon and Lactalis, following a series of dirty skirmishes and loud, behind-the-scenes battles that were waged for almost two years. The bitter dispute began in March 2007, when Lactalis and the Isigny Sainte-Mère dairy co-operative announced, in a coordinated move, their intention to halt the large-scale production of raw milk Camembert. It may not sound like much, but this was the first shot in the Norman cheese war, a thundering, unexpected explosion.

Suddenly the world's most famous cheese was in jeopardy. It was a severe blow to French national pride. This was about France's culinary splendor, which like the beret, the bottle of wine and the baguette, is as much a part of the French self-image as it is a time-honored cliché. Until then, Lactalis and Isigny had together produced more than 80 percent of the true and unique "Camembert de Normandie." The companies were responsible for 10,000 of the 13,000 tons of Camembert produced in France each year, or 42 million of 52 million boxes of cheese. And now they were saying, after more than 100 years of tradition, that it was all over, that Camembert made with raw milk presented an imminent danger and was a health hazard. It was a declaration of war.

More than Just Camembert

At first, French newspapers and magazines devoted as much attention to the story as they would have to a terrorist attack in downtown Paris. In fact, it was characterized as a kind of assassination, an assault on culinary tradition and the attempted murder of small Camembert producers. At first, it was not about cheese but tradition, about so much more than Camembert.

Morelon, whose job was to sell the company's decision to the public, became the symbolic figure of an anonymous industry that was laying its hands on France's holiest of possessions, all in the interest of profit. Instead of simply getting out of the market for raw milk Camembert and tacitly turning it over to other producers, from the very beginning Lactalis and Isigny behaved as if they wanted to destroy the entire market.

First of all they applied to the relevant authorities to have the celebrated Camembert Charter—whereby the cheese is legally certified with the Appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC), a term of origin valid under European Union law—rewritten for their benefit. In addition to raw milk, they wanted thermized, micro-filtered, industrially processed, cheaper milk to also qualify for the original Normandy Camembert certificate. Despite being Frenchmen in France, they seemed to be behaving like clueless foreigners from the European Union—those people who were ignorant of the French art of pleasure and who had always wanted to see everything pasteurized, heated at high temperatures and destroyed.