Real Food Festival in England

[Guest guest]

This week, Rose Prince investigates cheese made from raw milk

When words such as "real" are dangled around food, it's hard to know who's the bigger cynic, the food producer or me. Biscuits exist whether they are made with hydrogenated fat or butter. But, in the crazy, hazy world of food labelling, "real" has come to mean something. The term has become a symbol of the producer's purity of attitude to his recipe and ingredients. It has also appeared in the title of a new food show

From this Thursday to Sunday, at Earls Court in London, Britain's first Real Food Festival will showcase mainly small producers with chefs' demonstrations, workshops and endless delicious tastings. One stand has an exceptionally topical flavour. The Irish Raw Cow's Milk Cheese Presidium is run by a merry band of eight anarchists, not aggressive warriors, but artisans protecting the age-old practice of using unpasteurised milk in cheese making. It is a matter of flavour. Raw milk gives cheese symphonies of complexity, notes of flavour that make it stand out from the crowd.

Britain has its own group of about 95 raw milk cheeses (of a total of 500 artisan types). The Food Standards Agency believes that the producers of these cheeses make a point of being doubly vigilant, thereby rendering it very safe.

Not so in Ireland, home of some great cheeses, many of them now pasteurised. "The environment for any cheese maker in Ireland wanting to use raw milk has become hostile," says Randolph Hodgson of Neal's Yard Dairy, who imports Irish cheese to the UK. "Ireland has a very strong dairy farming sector, with powerful lobby groups who are anxious that their reputation should not be tarnished, and the mainstream think raw milk cheesemaking is a dangerous occupation."

Yet should vulnerable groups - pregnant women, the elderly and very young - avoid such cheese? You can see why there is concern. The European Communicable Disease Report shows a significant rise in cases of listeriosis, a condition that can cause premature foetal death in pregnant women. It is linked to cheese and Continental-style meat terrines but, since the bacteria incubates in soil, it can also be found on vegetables and salad.

Cheesemakers and dairies are very aware of the dangers and must test regularly for the pathogen. Microbiologist Neaves says it is extraordinary that not all producers do this. "It is odd that testing for listeria is not specified for vegetable growers or spice producers, when these foods are vulnerable to contamination," he says. "Cheesemakers are specifically told listeria must be absent in dairies."

Bovine TB is also scaring the dairy lobby in Ireland and the UK. But again, the case that humans could contract it by eating cheese is weak. "There is no evidence that Bovine TB in the UK can be transmitted by eating cheese," says Neaves. The acidity in cheese is thought to kill many types of bacteria (although they can survive in raw milk). The UK's Food Standards Agency is investigating the issue to make sure.

Neaves says we have to modernise our attitudes. "We are not living in the forties. Cows are no longer milked by hand, nor is the milk left outside in warm weather in churns. That is all gone." For a cheesemaker, all that matters is knowledge about the milk they use. "Whenever there has been a problem, it has been with milk purchased from an unknown source."

He believes the French system is better, where co-operatives of dairies sell to, say, Brie de Meaux; they are rewarded for higher quality and earn dividends from the sale of the cheese. "A farmer will be delisted by the co-operative if there is a high salmonella count in his milk." This is a lesson in shifting responsibility that the Irish milk industry ought to consider. If their husbandry is good and their milk safe, what is there to fear from eight small-scale cheesemakers?

And the Irish raw milk cheeses deserve celebration. St Gall, one of the products on show at Real Food, is the best cheese yet to come out of Ireland. Its orange rind hides a firm, nut-flavoured velvety inner cream with tiny suspended bubbles. There is also Durrus, a soft cheese with waves of perfectly balanced flavour made by Jeffa Bates, and Desmond, a delicious hard cheese made by Bill Hogan. A former secretary to Luther King, Hogan recently went through the courts to fight for compensation after the Irish authorities impounded £20,000worth of his cheese. He was successful.