Cheeses Lying Fallow. The Difficult Revival of Cheese Production in a Post-industrial Ariège Valley (Pyrenees, France)

Abstract

We would like to thank the respondents who kindly gave us their time, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the monitoring committee of this issue, whose comments helped us to improve our article. The results presented are from a survey funded by the Observatoire LabEx DRIIHM, for his judicious archival leads and to Hugues Barcet (UMR 5602 GEODE) for drawing up the map. 1In 2021, France had 46 cheeses with a protected designation of origin (PDO) and 9 with a protected geographical indication (PGI) (CNAOL, 2021). A large proportion of these cheeses come from mountain and foothill regions. While many labelled mountain cheeses are produced in the Alps and the Massif Central, there are only two in the Pyrenees: the PDO Ossau-Iraty (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), and the PGI Tomme des Pyrénées (all Pyrenean départements). Ariège has about ten cow milk cheesesincluding Bethmale, which is not labelled but has a regional reputation-, several goat milk cheeses, and a few ewe milk cheeses. The Ariège Pyrenees, where livestock for meat is by far the most prevalent type of farming (Lazaro, 2015), is the second-largest cheese production area in the massif, after the Atlantic Pyrenees (PNR, 2019). 2Cheese is a heuristic object for monitoring and analysing the dynamics of "reterritorialization" (Rieutort, 2009), "relocalization" (Frayssignes et al., 2021) and food "heritagization" in the mountains (Linck, 2005;Boëtsch and Hubert, 2007;Delfosse and Le Gall, 2018). Heritagization is understood here as "a dynamic of valorization […] consisting of updating, adapting and reinterpreting features drawn from the history of a group; that is, combining heritage and innovation, stability and change, reproduction and creation, and thus producing new social meaning by building on the past" Cheeses Lying Fallow. The Difficult Revival of Cheese Production in a Post-in...