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Thursday 21 August 2008

Cheese politics

Richard Sennett dines at The Table

‘No buffalo-thyme pizza?’ The grazing grounds around Naples are poisoned, grounds on which herds of water buffalo feed to produce Italy’s most delicate cheese. This ecological disaster has had a knock-on effect even here in Texas, where a rather-too-elegant youth and I are taking a snack break from the rigours of the Obama campaign. Sales of buffalo mozzarella in Italy are down 30 per cent to 40 per cent, South Korea bans its import and high-class eateries like the one we are in no longer serve it.

The mere fact that a political operative could ask for buffalo-thyme pizza signals an earthquake of sorts in American life. When I began writing speeches for Democratic candidates in the 1960s, politics literally smelled: a fog of cigarette smoke and the reek of half-eaten cheeseburgers impregnated the air of offices in which we toiled. Your standard Democratic party pol had a union card and drank beer rather than wine. Today the office smoke has been cleared by law, an army of budding young politicos virtuously order healthy salads at their desks, and the more sophisticated among them have cultivated a taste for foreign cheese. The Age of Champagne Socialism has finally arrived — or at least I hope so; Obama’s younger brothers and sisters are on the whole a decent lot.

Politics of a more traditional, and truly stinking, sort has caused the bufala crisis back in Italy. The collection of garbage in Naples is controlled by Camorra criminal gangs who pick it up infrequently and dump it illegally when they bother; dioxin from these mountains of refuse has seeped into the soil around Naples, where the best buffalo cheese is made. What is poison to buffaloes is also poisonous to cows, and the fear is that more ordinary mozzarellas are also infected. Traditionally, buffalo mozzarella was made with unpasteurised milk, and was truly fresh only for a day; even with more modern methods of production it continues to be fragile produce.

As with Britain’s BSE scare, panic can, however, run ahead of fact. By one reckoning, so far only 83 out of 1,900 buffalo dairy farms have been cited by the authorities as contaminated. Dioxin is indeed a carcinogen, but you’d have to eat a disgusting amount of bufala to do yourself serious harm.

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