The burial of 80Kg of Roquefort
It is a blue that has gone on for years, but the lowest point in our rocky relationship with Roquefort was September 18, 2003, when British-born importer Will Studd was ordered to destroy 80 kilograms of the ewe’s milk cheese that had been impounded for almost two years.
The crusading Studd had started importing the sweet-salty blue cheese from France in the 1990s, as part of his campaign to offer cheese-lovers a wider variety of international styles, including those made from raw milk. The French may have been making Roquefort since Roman times, with little damage to their digestive wellbeing, but Australia’s food safety authorities had a long-standing ban on the local production of raw-milk cheeses, concerned about listeria and other gastric ghastlies. Many Australian cheese producers also recoiled from manufacturing techniques involving raw milk.
But the ban puzzled Studd: if imported raw-milk cheeses were safe, why weren’t local ones? In 1994, he challenged the ban’s logic and the national food safety body immediately recognised the inconsistency. “To my horror, instead of changing the law in Australia, they decided to ban Roquefort,” Studd told the ABC in 2005.
Oops. The ban caught other raw-milk cheeses, such as parmigiano reggiano and rectifying that problem took another two years of lobbying but, still, the Roquefort ban remained.
