Why is Britain losing its love for cheddar?

BItaly has long been the butt of jokes when it comes to food. If it's not bland or heavy (think cauliflower with cheese, scotch egg and bread rolls), it's imported. In fact, we're the fourth-largest country in terms of food imports, behind Vietnam, Japan and Thailand. But things are changing. A sense of culinary breadth and national identity is sweeping the country, and cheese is leading the way.

These days, if you walk down the cheese aisle of a supermarket, you imagine you are in Brittany or Provence. Gone are the days when shelves from Shrewsbury to Slough groaned under the weight of great blocks of cheddar and red Leicester, those battle-hardened cheeses that have been the basis of our ploughmen’s lunches and cheese toasties for decades, while solitary wedges of Stilton lurked further back for the more adventurous.

Today, you are more likely to find a selection of Brie, Ossau-Iraty, Morbier, truffle cheeses, St Felicien, Chaource and Comté. Tesco recently reported that continental and artisanal cheeses are the fastest growing areas of the market.

“This is a trend we first noticed during lockdown, when people were unable to eat out at restaurants and opted for more sophisticated cheeses when shopping,” says Charlotte Gramlick, head of cheese buying. “But that trend has become even more pronounced now, during the more challenging times of late, with people staying at home for longer, leading shoppers to indulge in new cheeses alongside their favourite classics such as cheddar and stilton.”

So cheddar’s demise hasn’t quite arrived (sales are up just 4% compared with 23.2% for feta, 27.4% for halloumi and 17% for burrata, according to Ocado), and the cheese is enjoying a new lease of life in artisanal form, with brands such as Pitchfork and Montgomery’s, both from Somerset, flying off the shelves. (Like parmesan, cheddar’s provenance is protected by EU law. It can only be produced in Somerset, Devon, Dorset and Cornwall.)

But it’s clear that Britain’s taste in cheese is changing. TikTok is awash with more than 460 million videos of cottage cheese, baked and whipped feta and grated halloumi. Mild cheddar? No thanks. We want something milder, stronger and, most importantly, stinkier.

“The whole market has been working to encourage consumers to eat more cheese like our Italian, French and Spanish counterparts would, but rather than saying ‘eat this cheese, rather than eat that cheese’, there is more incentive to eat both cheeses, to have variety on your cheese board and to have a variety of cheeses in the fridge at all times,” says Catherine Mead, owner of Lynher Dairies in Truro, which produces Cornish yarg.

Yarg, a semi-hard cheese wrapped in locally harvested nettles, is one of more than 750 UK-produced cheeses enjoying a newfound fame in the cheese renaissance. It is mushroomy, lemony, creamy and crumbly, and has been winning awards since Lynher Dairies began producing it in the 1980s.

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“It was one of the first new British cheeses to be made in response to the very limited availability of specialty cheeses,” says Mead. Back then, cheddar reigned supreme and only a handful of artisan and family producers were producing (literally) the continental-style cheeses we know today. “Milk prices were absolutely terrible at the time.” [dairy farmers blamed the Tories, the Tories blamed Labour, and so on and so forth] and it was widely recognized that diversification could be a route to better pricing.”

It also came at a time when, as now, there was a sense of culinary nationalism sweeping through Britain. “We had a market that was quite inundated with imported specialty cheeses, so there was clearly an interest in a range of cheeses,” says Mead. “We wanted to buy products made in Britain, we wanted to know more about provenance and integrity and to have food made close to home.” Sound familiar? 2024 is the new 1980.

You might be surprised to learn that great British cheeses like Cornish yarg, which seem new, have been around for almost half a century, but Mead says the artisanal cheese industry has grown exponentially in the past two and a half years, when the market was at its most volatile due to the knock-on effect on input prices of the war between Russia and Ukraine. “Yarg sales have gone from nothing to 200 tonnes a year,” Mead says. “We’re getting better at what we do. And some people might say, ‘Well, they’ve been doing it for quite a while – you know, 40 years’ – but that’s nothing in the cheese world.”

Lynher Dairies makes its cheese from more than 2 million litres of milk a year from a herd of Ayrshire cows, a Scottish breed known for their efficient grazing and milk production. “We breed them in such a way that they tend to have between 11 and 14 lactations, so they are much older than the average working dairy cow,” which are typically slaughtered after three or four lactations.

Lynher Dairies has even started selling meat from its ex-dairy cows, as there is an appetite among consumers to buy more sustainable meat from animals that have lived longer, happier lives.

Jonny Crickmore, farmer and producer of another award-winning British artisan cheese, Baron Bigod, says the environmental and animal welfare benefits of artisan cheese could also explain its sudden growth. “Why buy cheese? Because it’s a great source of protein that’s not meat,” he says. “People are trying to more consciously reduce their meat consumption. Obviously, I’m biased towards cheese, but you’re not killing the animal. You only kill an animal once to eat it. Whereas with cheese, you’re working with an animal. The animal has a life and it maximises the use of all the pastures in the UK.”

A few years ago, the rise of the vegan movement caused many people to turn their backs on the dairy industry for ethical reasons. But now, “people are moving back to a less plant-based diet and more based on animal and vegetable proteins, and that is possibly one of the reasons why we are seeing a growth in cheese,” she says.

The health benefits of cheese have also long been misunderstood. Despite its high saturated fat content and salt levels, it is packed with surprising health benefits. The milk proteins found in cheese can lower blood pressure and certain components can decrease the amount of fat we absorb, moderating blood lipids including cholesterol. Fermented dairy products like cheese also offer benefits through their impact on gut microflora. So, indulging in our creamy, crumbly favorites could actually be doing our bodies a favor.

Crickmore says cheese is leading the way in a revival of fine food in the UK. “It has changed enormously over the last 40 or 50 years. If you go back to the 1980s, you either had blocks of cheddar in supermarkets, or if you wanted really good cheese you had to go to specialist cheesemongers who imported it from France,” he says. He points to Neal’s Yard Dairy, founded in Covent Garden in 1979, as a driving force behind good quality British cheese. “Slowly, as the years have gone by, new people have come into the industry, like us.”

Fen Farm Dairy in Crickmore, Suffolk, started making Baron Bigod about 15 years ago. It’s the British equivalent of Brie de Meaux, a French cheese made from raw cow’s milk (regular Brie uses pasteurised milk) that has been protected by EU law since 1980. Crickmore was “really frustrated with the dairy industry. There were a lot of two-for-one deals and discounts on milk, and that was really putting pressure on dairy farms. I wanted to be able to do something about it, rather than being forced to have prices lowered. And we came up with the idea of ​​cheese.” They started selling their raw cow’s milk on the doorstep, and locals gobbled it up. They realised they could turn it into Brie de Meaux, and even imported 17 Montbéliarde cows from France to do the job.

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What began as a last-minute rescue operation has gone from a gourmet privilege to a world-renowned cheese. Baron Bigod was named Best British Cheese by Compendium of good foodinspired a story about The Archers And even the late queen ordered it. Now, “some days we don’t have enough milk to supply all our customers. I would never have believed it.”

But, says Crickmore, “the British palate is changing. Our taste buds are changing and we're discovering new flavours and different styles of cheese. And that's growing, it's becoming fashionable. Because cheese is quite addictive, isn't it? Once you try it, you want more.

“It’s addictive in a good way, of course,” he quickly adds.

Although the rehabilitation of cheese is probably a long way off, we are consuming and producing more cheese in the UK than ever before. Many of our best cheeses compete in the World Cheese Awards, held each autumn. “There are 4,500 entries from 38 countries with 350 judges from who knows how many countries. Every country and every type of cheese is up for grabs,” says Mead. “And British cheeses do really well against all those other very established cheeses, like Gruyère, Parmesan, Emmental, Brie de Meaux, Mozzarella and Gorgonzola.” Cornish Kern, Lynher Dairies’ other cheese, came 12th last year.

“You could say, ‘That’s what you would say, right?’ but I think our industry should be congratulated for how far we’ve come and how well we make cheese. I think we get credit for that, but you can never say it enough, really.”

Britain is slowly taking the crown from its European counterparts in cheese production, proving that it's no longer a matter of playing catch-up. We're not just participating in the global cheese conversation, we're shaping it, wheel by wheel.