Slow Food’s Slow Cheese campaign culminates with Cheese, the biennial event dedicated to milk in all its shapes and forms, which draws attention to the current challenges and successes of the dairy sector.
The world has been losing a dramatic amount of cheeses, animal breeds, pastures, herders, skills and ancient knowledge over the past few decades. Losing a product means that our food culture and the freedom to choose what we eat are at stake.
One problem the dairy sector has to face is that the use of raw milk in cheesemaking is restricted in many countries. Our fight to promote it is largely based on the notion that only raw milk can give cheeses the specific flavors that create a distinct taste that tells the story of a place and its characteristics. Pasteurization has led to the standardization of dairy products: The heating process eliminates the bacteria that contribute to the flavor and distinct characteristics of a cheese, and the artificially re-introduced bacteria for pasteurized milk cheese production are the same worldwide, making industrial cheeses lack territorial character and taste identical from Japan to Australia to Sweden. Prohibiting the use of raw milk thus narrows down the variety of dairy products and slowly suffocates distinct tastes belonging to a specific territory or identity of a community.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Slow Food / Cheese
