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Saturday 22 November 2008

Cheese politics

Richard Sennett dines at The Table

So much ado about nothing? Not so. The authorities who offer reassurance are Italian authorities, and Italians themselves have even less trust than Brits in official pronouncements. The story of bad cheese also encapsulates the weakness of the state in combating crime; the city of Naples has long co-existed with the Camorra, a cursed marriage in which the city has usually been the abused partner. Since nearly everyone in Italy is a serious foodie, tainted cheese has become quite a personal and powerful symbol of political failure. My etiolated co-worker in Texas, who had spent a year working in a homeless shelter — as I say, these are good kids — drew an equal lesson from the forbidden pizza: financial markets no less than cheese need strong regulation.

Be this as it may, what buffalo mozzarella can you trust? Any imported bufala which displays the seal of ‘Protected Designation of Origin’, a European Union certificate, will probably be fine. Cheese with this seal is rigorously inspected, and many of the fields which bear the certificate are far from Naples. The gastronome’s problem is that many fine producers are just too small or too poor to participate in this system. Since poisoned soil can harbour contaminants other than dioxin, I’d recommend with regret that you give these undoubtedly excellent local products a miss.

On a more upbeat note, buffalo milk produces more varied food than the tubs of round cheese we are familiar with in Britain. Barilotto, for instance, is a firm-textured cheese resembling ricotta salata; Casa Madaio is a certified producer who ships to Britain and to the States. Or you might find buffalo-milk butter made by Fattorie Garofalo: richer and more pungent than cow’s butter, sea-foamy when heated, this ambrosia poses a health hazard only to one’s arteries and veins.

Of course, the cheese crisis could be solved by producing by industrial means a pristine-pure, rubbery substance just labelled bufala. Or not so pure: supermarket bufala would be full of preservatives, inoculants and the like. If you can’t take the politics out of the real thing, I then pose to you, a Spectator reader, and so likely to be European Union-unfriendly, the following conundrum: whose cheese would you rather eat, the bufala regulated by a Brussels bureaucrat or the bufala produced under the sign of the Camorra?

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