France remains ‘le grand fromage’ in the European Union, and Camembert remains in a wooden box

The European Union has long known that the way to France's heart is through its stomach. So, don't touch the Camembert — never, ever. Legislators at the European Parliament made sure it won't happen anytime soon. Tucked in a proposal on streamlining and optimizing waste management throughout the 27-nation bloc, some French cheese producers in recent weeks sniffed out something and turned it into a culinary stink. They claimed that the proposal's wording would make it illegal for the famous cheese to be cradled into its usual wooden packaging for its final weeks of ripening and, eventually, sale. The round box is as essentially Camembert as its unctuous texture and pungent smell. Suddenly, there was a frenzied flutter that something fundamentally French would fall foul of the Brussels bureaucrats — derisively known by many as Eurocrats — who are all too often blamed for flaws real and false. The reasoning was this: If Camembert were forced into something easier to recycle like plastic, the perfect breathing of the cheese through wood might instead produce something sweaty and flabby. Wood, however, is hard to recycle sustainably, and the EU wants to remove it from food packaging as much as possible. Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius said ahead of the vote that the EU would make sure that the raw-milk specialized non-industrial Camemberts — those with a controlled designation of origin — will be exempt from any such regulation. The action proved that cheese can be an effective binding agent, as European legislators ranging from free-trade liberals to the far-right made sure that an amendment to allow wooden boxes in case of exceptional circumstances would survive. This article was provided by The Associated Press.