France has been having a bad time of late, and it’s not just because of riots, fires and looting — incidentally, if anyone wants 250 slightly singed Paris Saint-Germain football jerseys and several dozen boxes of apéricubes, please look for me on eBay.
The droughts and heat waves that battered Europe mean strict production rules for some of France’s most famous cheeses were loosened. Comté, Beaufort and Abondance — not a French kids TV series about three dairy-loving glove puppets but rather cheeses made out of milk from cows that graze in the mountains and carry the appellation d’origine protégée label — all suffered because of a lack of suitable grazing land, so farmers were allowed to temporarily change the diet of their cows (perhaps to Diet Coke and Mars bars).
And it’s not just France that’s having cheese problems.
Readers over the age of four may remember Italy as Europe’s version of the fun uncle who isn’t an actual uncle; wonderfully entertaining but also disturbingly unstable. Though Italy has been a bastion of calm of late (relatively speaking).
That appears to be coming to an end now, as a truckers’ strike has wreaked havoc on the production of buffalo mozzarella. The war in Iran has caused the cost of fuel to soar, so the truck drivers have pulled over to the side of the road, which means buffalo milk cannot reach dairies in the Naples region, and the cheese cannot reach customers.
Italians, who never have any strong opinions on food (!!!!!!), are furious and hungry in equal measure, with an estimated €3 million of cheesy, milky goodness lost in just 24 hours.