French cheese is not mouldy enough, according to some of the country’s leading scientists, who say the likes of camembert could disappear because of a decline in fungi.
The National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) warned that a decades-old drive to make camembert with a standard white rind had adversely affected the fungus used in making the cheese.
The fungus could die out as a result, which means the cheese could disappear, it said in a report on its website.
Blue cheeses such as Roquefort are also under threat
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The centre says blue cheeses su ch as Roquefort are also under threat, although not such an urgent one as surface-ripened varieties such as camembert and brie, which risked “extinction”.
Both families of cheese are made by inoculating the curd with a fungus. Penicillium roqueforti produces the blue spores that are the hallmark of Roquefort, while Penicillium camemberti gives camembert and brie the distinctive texture of their rinds.
The fungus is thought to have grown naturally on cheeses kept in dank cellars, notably in Normandy, where camembert was invented by Marie Harel, a farmer’s wife, on the advice of a priest she hid during the French Revolution.
Cheesemakers came to realise that it was simpler to use laboratory-produced spores. Initially, the curds of camembert were inoculated with different strains, which resulted in rinds of various textures and colours, including orange, grey, green and blue.
From the 1950s onwards, manufacturers demanded cloned fungi strains that grew quickly and met their “their self-imposed specifications,” according to the CNRS, which said cheeses had to be “appealing, with a good flavour, no unappetising colours and no … toxins secreted by fungi”.
In Normandy, cheesemakers selected an albino strain of Penicillium camemberti to ensure camembert rinds were white, as they did south of Paris, where brie is made.
“But what happened, as it does every time an organism large or small is subjected to overly drastic selection, is that their genetic diversity has been greatly reduced,” Jeanne Ropars, a researcher at Paris-Saclay University’s ecology, systematics and evolution laboratory, said. “Working with micro-organisms, the cheesemakers didn’t realise that they had selected a single individual, which is not sustainable over the long term.”
The CNRS said the micro-organisms in cheese “are capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction”, but the food industry relied “on the asexual method, producing clonal lineages to perpetuate the moulds”.
This results in cheese with a standard format but “over time, induces the degeneration of the [fungus] strain in question”.
Tatiana Giraud, another researcher at the laboratory, said: “This is what happens when we completely stop using sexual reproduction.”
The report added: “Blue cheeses may be under threat, but the situation is much worse for camembert, which is already on the verge of extinction.”
It said Penicillium camemberti had not only lost its capacity for sexual reproduction, but also “its ability to produce asexual spores. As a result it is now very difficult for the entire industry to obtain enough spores to inoculate their production.”
Giraud said the trend could only be reversed through “the diversity provided by sexual reproduction between individuals with different genomes”.
That would lead to cheeses that did not always look or taste the same, but the CNRS added: “If cheese lovers want to keep enjoying these products, they will have to learn to appreciate greater diversity in flavour, colour and texture.”