Finally, the French are making a stand, albeit a long overdue one, for the authenticity and taste of one of their greatest foods -- soft raw milk cheeses like Brie, Camembert, Epoisses... This week, a committee of experts and new found patriots found for the ancient and amazing RAW MILK Camembert, saying only it should be given the Appellation Controlee label that confirms its authenticity. Pasteurized Camembert doesn't hack it. Anyone who loves the fiery taste of raw milk cheese will be celebrating today.

Not least because the French have been running away from their heritage of raw milk cheese as the EU pushes hyperhygiene. Formerly the French were sanguine to trade a possible gastric upset (even the very rare death) from a pathogen lurking in the milk, but foodborne illnesses are now global scares, and by the eighties the French were getting nervous themselves.

In addition, as I wrote in Last Chance to Eat, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is now compiling a codex listing how cheese should be made across the board! And the loudest voices on the committee come from the big industrial and international cheesemakers.

The producers of raw milk cheese, and they range from Parmesan, Roquefort to the great soft cheeses,are at a disadvantage beside Kraft when it comes to global politics. The industrial cheesemakers want all cheeses to be made from pasteurized milk ostensibly for health reasons but really because pasteurization is too expensive a process for small cheesemakers who would thus be driven out of business.

The Swiss and the Italians have hung tough but the French have buckled to a certain extent. They began making "thermise" cheese, raw milk heated at lower temperatures and longer times than pasteurization. They claimed the taste was unchanged.

Difference in taste? Definitely.

Thermise Epoisse, which has practically replaced vrai raw milk here in Toronto, is blander and stodgier. Trouble is you can't tell whether a cheese has been thermise because labelling isn't required. You have to ask your cheesemonger and hope she knows what she's selling you.

How did Camembert stop the rot? According to Charles Bremner blogging in the London Times, five small producers (not to be confused with farmhouse cheesemakers who are mostly gone) started a war with the dominant industrial Camembert producers, the Lactalis dairy giant and a cheese cooperative at Isigny in Normandy.

Two premium brands owned by Lactalis -- Lepetit and Lanquetot -- dominate the real camembert market in France. The company decided to start making its cheese termise while Isigny decided to micr-filter its milk. Both cited safety as the consideration.

The small producers cried foul, saying that such tampering ruined it. Heat-treating the milk was a sin equivalent to shovelling cheap grapes into grand cru wine vats, they said. The big firms agreed to drop their "AOC" label of authenticity while a committee of experts investigated.

Their verdict in favour of strict lait cru only was announced yesterday and it will certainly be endorsed in time by the state AOC agency. It has been depicted abroad as a David-against-Goliath victory for the French culinary heritage (soon to be protected by Unesco). "

The victory should alas be taken with a draft of raw milk. The committee comprised fired-up locals. Bremner posts "For France these days, flavour is political. It's one of the last things that France knows it does better than just about everyone else. The purity of camembert, said to have been devised just after the French revolution, is closely tied to the defence of le terroir. Difficult to define in English, this is the notion that wine and all other traditional food products and dishes owe their quality to the nature of the soil and the society in which they originate. Terroir is taken very seriously and taught to school children. "

If this were true why can you only find a farmhouse Brie in the Rothschild Museum, and why are only only 10 percent of the 650 cheeses sold in French supermarkets made from raw milk?