Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/15/bye-bye-brie-your-beloved-stinky-cheeses-are-at-risk-of-extinction.html
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Tragedy. I won’t be able to get blue cheese stuffed olives for my martinis.
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I don’t personally like stinky moldy cheeses, but I can understand why this is bad. Hopefully, they can figure out a good way to introduce some variety into the microorganisms without accidentally starting the zombiepocalypse.
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Have they tried looking inside of mennonite delis? Mom walked into one of them once and immediately walked out because the small overwhelmed her
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(need to put a sample of the critical fungus in a white hat under nitrogen)
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I personally wouldn’t consider brie or camembert particularly stinky cheeses. There are way more pungent ones, e.g., Munster (which OTOH isn’t especially moldy).
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Corporate food producers ruining things with monoculture, as always
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Muenster, on the other hand, is wonderfully mild and pleasant. My favorite cheese.
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Careful, we might run afoul of the Friends of Carlotta
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That might be true for the microbes used to inoculate the cheese, but brie in France is often, if not usually, made with raw milk and brie in the US – if I am not mistaken – cannot be legally made with raw milk. Penicillium still dominates, but the raw milk contributes other microbes that have a definite impact on the flavor.
And trust me, I’m not in the “raw milk is always better” camp – I can get it readily in France, but most things I have tried to use it for make me feel like I’m going to explode like the guy in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
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No thanks. Only mimolette for me. Milbenkäse is acceptable
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Only some is made with raw milk, and they’re really stringent about it, they talk about roquefort which is made of raw goats milk, they randomly test 100’s of liters, and if they detect even one nasty pathogen, the whole amount of milk goes to be pasteurized, and turned into the crap version of roquefort (st augur maybe?).
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Remember back when the big story was that the Cavendish banana, being largely a monoculture, was five years away from being totally wiped out by a fungus?
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I did not brie that coming.
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Meh, collect toe-nail clippings until they find a replacement.
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That, at least, already happened to the Gros Michel. I’ve been told the switch to the cavendish, which is milder in flavor, is why banana-flavored stuff tastes nothing like any banana I’ve ever eaten. And bananas aren’t just a monoculture, they are seedless and grown from rhizomes, aka all commercial banana plants are clones and thus unusually genetically vulnerable. They’re not unique in that by any means. Apple varieties are also not true breeding and are grown from grafts not seed, for example. But it can cause major vulnerabilities.
There has been a huge amount of research and engineering to reduce the effects, and a lot of controls to slow (not stop, sadly; it finally reached Colombia in 2019) the spread. If the Cavendish does survive, then like the ozone layer, it’ll have been because people took the problem seriously and put in the work needed to solve it.
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The upside is that it makes banana plants more amenable to genetic engineering, and hence a possible future solution to the fungus issue. The often-heard argument “but what if the genetic modifications get out into the environment?” carries less weight when banana plants don’t reproduce on their own.
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