How to Allow Cheese into Your Sustainable Diet

Call me the typical millennial hipster if you like, but I’ve been a flexitarian since before the word flexitarian existed.

It all started with a misguided foray into vegetarianism (after reading an in-depth exploration of the steer farming industry by none other than Michael Pollan in the early years). It wasn’t vegetarianism in general that was wrong, but mine was the kind that relied on trans-fat fried potato chips and nutrient-deficient pasta, out-of-season berries, and avocados brought in from Mexico.

It wasn’t until I moved to France that everything changed.

I remember it well. I was seventeen years old and sitting in the dining room of a woman in her seventies who was hosting six girls, including me. Each of the other five had a plate adorned with a blue cord, a chicken breast stuffed with ham and cheese before being breaded and fried. (It’s delicious, FWIW).

My host mother looked at me.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know about you.”

And he disappeared into the kitchen, only to come out with a plate containing a whole fish. I mean whole. Eyes, head and everything.

So what did this vegetarian do?

Eat it, of course.

This was the first moment I was faced with the very real ramifications of the kind of mocking taunt that vegetarians are all too familiar with: “He’s already dead. Why not just eat it? The logic never seemed to make sense to me at the grocery store – reduced demand always seemed to me, even for this non-economics major, a good thing, and indeed an increase in flexitarianism has shown. power plant today. based meat market. But a fish cooked on a plate, lovingly prepared by the hands of this woman who had opened her house to me, seemed like something I could not refuse.

My vegetarianism soon fell by the wayside, not because they didn’t bother me, but because this was just the beginning of my brushes with the way the French chose to interpret my vegetarian diet. Saying “I am a vegetarian” in my adopted country for 13 years has led me, on different occasions, to people serving me not only fish but chicken (“But ma’am it is not red meat. “), pork (” It’s not veal “), veal (” It’s not pork “), and a sad salad of carrots and tomatoes even though I ate, and have always eaten, cheese. Flexitarianism led me to delve into the Real reasons why I chose to eat, or avoid, a certain food: Was it for human reasons? Environmental? Social impact? I just didn’t like it?

Living in France, in essence, has taught me to be more aware of what I eat and to design the type of diet I follow today: mainly plants, with exceptions made for foods rooted in a tradition so strong that rejecting it would be rudeness of the highest level. .

Oh. And cheese.

(This is where some of you may call me a hypocrite.)

Despite living and writing about food in France, these days I follow a predominantly plant-based diet. The meat I bought once always came directly from a farm through the locavore organization La Ruche Qui Dit Oui, but these days, I only eat meat if it is a) Being served by a producer or b) In a restaurant where I am the chef he’s as careful about sourcing as I am. If I eat fish at home, they are usually sustainably fished anchovies; If I eat eggs, they often come from Poulehouse, an organic producer working with chickens that are “too old” for traditional laying operations and therefore less productive. Buying from Poulehouse prevents those chickens from being slaughtered.

But cheese … cheese is a weakness of mine.

I love cheese. I love the umami-rich flavors and textures that range from sticky to marshmallows to runny. I love those from Comté that melt like candy on the tongue; I love the ones like Epoisses that are best stored in the garage to avoid offending the olfactory sense of the people who share your home.

From the archives of the organic authority

And professionally speaking, cheese is an important part of what I do. As a food guide and journalist, I have built my career on my love for cheese.

But I also have strong human and environmental principles that extend to everything from the type of deodorant I use to how often I take short-haul flights. I decided that the years of burying my head in the sand on the subject of cheese they finished. I had to take a deeper look at my cheese habit.

The cheese problem

The problems with cheese are manifold.

From a human point of view, industrial dairy products are almost as bad as industrial beef. Dairy cows get pregnant over and over again; calves are removed at birth and confined for their short life before being slaughtered. Typical American dairy cows are confined in a concrete barn for their entire lives and are culled after four to five years, when they become less productive.

Meanwhile, from an environmental point of view, cheese is quite a demanding product to produce. The BBC’s climate change food calculator, based on data from Oxford, shows that eating a 30 gram serving of cheese three to five times a week for a year generates 201 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions. (By comparison, eating a quarter-pound serving of beef just as often generates 1,611 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions – about eight times more than the habit of cheese three times a week.)

Beef is much worse, yes, but cheese is still the culprit.

And then of course there is the fact that although during the time I was a vegetarian, I did eat cheese (and quite a bit), many cheeses use animal rennet, an enzyme that comes from the stomach of a veal calf, for clotting and, therefore, he is not a vegetarian at all.

French cheese.

Photo by Alexander Maasch on Unsplash

How to eat cheese sustainably

For some experts, the only way to include cheese in a sustainable diet is not at all. These experts point to plant-based options to get your fill, and frankly, there are more than a handful to choose from these days. Whole Foods sells more than 80 types of vegan cheese, and even here in France, there are quite a few producers of fake making plant-based options designed to please even the most discriminating French.

But there is another element of cheese that is essential to me as a journalist and a turóphile, and that is its story.

Here in France, we have more than 1000 types of cheese, made by producers large and small. There are cheeses that have stood the test of time, such as the Cantal which is almost 2,000 years old; there are cheeses that were invented by entrepreneurs cheese makers during the confinement. There are cheeses like Comté, whose annual production reaches 70,000 tons; there are cheeses so precise that only five people in the country make them. There are cheeses aged in natural volcanic cellars and cheeses made with a bread mold. There is even a cheese, Maroilles, which was invented as a substitute for meat in the 10th century.

I think all that history is worth preserving … despite the environmental ramifications.

So I have chosen to eat cheese, although not as often as I would like. I choose versions of raw milk, which are tastier and healthier, and which, as Piero Sardo, president of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, points out, reduces the waste implicit in destroying the natural flora of milk only to replace it with enzymes. artificial.

I only eat cheese made from grass-fed animals, the norm in France, but also from smaller producers in the US I’m actively looking for producers who rely on renewable energy or those enrolled in programs like the Green Dairy Cohort, who are looking to help producers to reduce their environmental impact.

I stay abreast of new research and developments that further reduce the impact of cheese, such as Dutch solutions to reduce water waste and even to ferment a vegetarian rennet from the yeast Kluyveromyces lactis, eradicating dependence on calves.

I choose local cheeses from producers I know (or producers my cheese shop knows!), And I savor every bite, opting for quality over quantity.