As cities across France are burnt and ransacked by protesters, it seems the French general was right. Paris now looks less like La Ville-Lumière and more like the aftermath of the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue in Lynchburg, Tennessee — the home of that particular spirit but not a place you can drink it, as it is a “dry” county (and they say Americans don’t do irony). 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. The problem is that buffaloes are known to be unreasonable creatures that have to be milked regardless of whether dairies are open or closed, and strict production rules require their milk be turned into mozzarella within 60 hours.
A spokesperson for buffalo made a low rumbling sound. A spokesperson for bison said: “This has got nothing to do with us. We are two distinct types of animal.” Can you do better?
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Extract — continue reading at the source.
