Cheese sales soar in French lockdown – but an Italian is biggest winner
How did the French keep smiling through the Covid lockdown? Not by saying “cheese” but by eating it, figures suggest.
Researchers say cheese consumption at home soared last year as the confined population sought comfort food. And in a nation that boasts 246 kinds of cheese, as noted by the former president Charles de Gaulle, it was Italian mozzarella that benefited most, with a 21.2% rise in sales in 2020.
Others on the rise were raclette – a mostly winter speciality cheese melted and eaten with charcuterie and boiled potatoes – up 12.2%, comté (8.2%) and emmental (7.8%).
According to data from the French agency AgriMer, sales of cheeses produced from cows’ milk rose by 9.4%, organic goats’ cheese jumped by 32.2% and organic sheep’s cheese rose by 5.5%.
The increase in consumption at home was offset against a decrease in purchases from restaurants forced to close during the three-month lockdown that began in March and the second lockdown that started in October.
The figures were reported in the specialist food magazine Les Marchés, which said: “The purchase of cheeses by the French for consumption at home beat all records in 2020 because of the pandemic.”
It said cheese had “several advantages that come into play during this strange period. It can be used as an ingredient, especially as home cooking has increased especially during the first lockdown. It is synonymous with comfort, especially when melted, and it plays a part in conviviality with raclettes or more refined meals … it is also being used as part of a menu, mostly in the evening, for an easy and quick meal.”
French consumer organisations also noted an increase in the sale of raclette machines – used to melt the cheese – for use in homes. A spokesperson for the appliances store Boulanger told Le Figaro newspaper that sales of the machine leapt by more than 200% last November.
Last year the Association des Fromages Traditionnels des Alpes Savoyardes (AFTAlp), producers of raclette cheese, said home sales had compensated for the loss of restaurant orders.
At least 15% of raclette cheese produced in the Savoie region is sold to ski stations. While winter sports mountain resorts have remained open this winter, the government ordered them to shut their lifts, meaning no downhill skiing has been possible.
The French are believed to consume on average 26.4kg of cheese a year, according to 2017 figures, behind Danes, Icelanders and Finns in Europe. The most popular cheese in France is camembert, closely followed by comté. When pollsters ask the French for their view on having a meal without cheese, the most common response is “unimaginable”.
Over the past decade, many of Europe’s centre-left parties have been battered, bruised and not infrequently humiliated at elections. In France, the Socialist party languishes at below 10% in the polls. The Dutch Labour party underwent a near-death experience at the general election of 2017. Italy’s Democrats have lost swaths of working-class support to the populist right and were at one point eclipsed by the Five Star Movement. Germany’s Social Democratic party (SPD) has slipped badly behind the Greens. Soul-searching about the future of the left has not been confined to Britain and Labour.
This week, elections in the Netherlands are likely to see the dismal record continue. The Labour party is predicted to improve only modestly on its dire performance of four years ago, when it lost 75% of the seats it held. But the weekend offered the first tentative signs that, after the wilderness years, the wheel of political fortune may just be turning for Europe’s beleaguered social democrats.
It would be premature to read too much into the disastrous performance of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party at two state elections, where it scored its worst-ever results. Both regions were already controlled by political opponents – Rhineland-Palatinate by the Social Democrats and Baden-Württemberg by the Greens. The results were also heavily influenced by Covid-related factors, from the slow rollout of the vaccination programme, to corruption scandals involving alleged kickbacks to CDU politicians from mask procurement deals. The eventual impact of these issues on September’s general election is difficult to predict.
Nevertheless, this was a damaging setback for the European Union’s most powerful and successful centreright party. Suddenly, the CDU appears vulnerable, despite its sizeable lead in national polls. As chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to step down, a new three-way coalition – between the Greens, the SPD and the liberal Free Democrats - has emerged as a genuine possibility. For the SPD, which has haemorrhaged support while serving as junior partner in a CDU-led grand coalition, this would represent a road to renewal and rehabilitation. Meanwhile in Italy, the Democratic party’s new leader, Enrico Letta, has also been talking up the possibility of a future centre-left alliance. At the last election, in 2018, the Democrats fought, and lost, alone. On Sunday, Mr Letta hinted at a first electoral pact with the environmentally-friendly Five Star Movement.
Such alliances can take advantage of an ideological sea-change. Following the financial crash of 2008, the European centre-left paid a calamitous price for enacting the EU economic orthodoxy of austerity. Social democrats ran or participated in governments associated with cutting state spending and lowering the living standards of the less well-off. Their number included Mr Letta, prime minister of Italy from 2013 to 2014. But the twin challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate emergency have buried that old consensus. The EU’s €750bn Covid recovery fund, its largest-ever stimulus package, has itself been dwarfed in scale by the Biden administration’s $1.9tn equivalent. Big government is making a comeback, driven by the urgent need for green investment to meet slipping climate targets, and the priority of ensuring post-Covid economic growth.
The map of political priorities is thus being re-drawn in a way that should be meat and drink to parties that lost their way in the 2010s. The road to redemption for the traditional centre-left will depend on forging new alliances, particularly with the newly influential green movement. The weekend, in a very small way, was a start.