Hugh Johnson
MY NAME is Graham, and I’m a cheesoholic.
I’m generally quite restrained at the table, but I can’t resist cheese. Hard, soft, runny, smoked, blue, British, continental, pasteurised, unpasteurised. If there is cheese on offer, I will keep on eating it until one of us is defeated. I eat it for breakfast and snack on it at night.
Recently, my cheese habit has become even more central to my diet. Last year I quit meat, finally fed up by its environmental and animal welfare record. It wasn’t easy, but what was there to fill the void? Why, my old friend cheese! Halloumi, paneer and parmesan are now my beef, chicken and pork.
I’m happy to live without meat. But lately I have been wrangling with my conscience again. Cheese is made from milk, and milk comes from cows. Cattle farming is appalling for the climate. Cows belch out vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that no known technology can stop from being vented into the atmosphere. Most dairy farming is a form of factory farming, with all the attendant animal rights issues. I haven’t kept a record, but I am sure my cheese consumption has gone up since I swore off meat. So have I just swapped one environmental and animal welfare sin for another – one that is possibly even worse?
This is an uncomfortable question for many people. A number of my colleagues said, half-jokingly, “please don’t do that story”. They were saying they would rather not know. They were right.
The cheese industry is a gigantic, and growing, success story. World production is at least …
