Strict rules govern the production of Salers cheese—and they can't be met because of this summer's poor weather conditions.
“Salers is a seasonal cheese, made with the seasonal grass. It’s one of the pillars of its identity,” the president of a cheesemakers’ group told the. “With more hay [instead of grass], the paste would be whiter; we would have less flavors. Our product still has a certain reputation among consumers—we don’t want to break it.”
Typically, 78 farmers work from April 15 to November 15 to create about 2.4 million pounds of Salers each year, according to the French Ministry of Agriculture. The cheese is considered an AOP good, meaning it comes from a specific area and has an established reputation. It also means that the cheese must meet certain standards—in this case, at least 75 percent of a cow’s diet has to be grass from local pastures.
This is where the problem begins: Because of the extreme heat occurring across the country, pastures are all dried out, and there’s not enough grass for the cows to feed on. “We have always had periods of drought in the summer, but this is hard, very hard,” one farmer told the local outlet Bleu. During previous droughts, some farmers received permission to lower the standard so that local grass only had to make up 50 percent of a cow’s diet, but even that is untenable this season.Salers is just the latest European culinary casualty thanks to climate change. Earlier this summer, France was dealing with a
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