Yet Another Reason To Love Canada


Sometimes when we’re bored, we amuse ourself by playing this game of How Would We Get Away With Various Criminal Acts. Take smuggling, for instance. We could fill a prescription drug bottle with black-market diamonds. Assuming we had access to black-market diamonds, or the capital with which to buy them.

One of the particular objects in need of a good smuggling strategy, for us, is raw-milk brie. Not so much the question of storage (false-bottomed backpack, cheese wrapped in toweling), as the question of how on earth we would be able to keep ourselves from eating the entire freaking wheel before departing Country A, let alone entering Country B.

Well now the journey is a little bit shorter (though the temptation to consume en route is no less great): instead of having to haul in our illegal dairy products all the way from France and thereabouts, we can just take a quick hop and skip across the northern border: Hallelujah, Americans: Quebec has legalized raw-milk cheese!

Of course, it’s not an unregulated free-for-all. To offset any potential health concerns, there are some restrictions being laid down:

Under the new rules, Quebec will require each cheesemaker to know his or her milk supplier personally, and to be knowledgeable about the dairy operation in question. As well, milk suppliers for this specialty segment of the market will be subjected to much higher standards of cleanliness than those imposed even on France’s raw-milk cheese producers.

Well thank heavens for clean cheese, we can get behind that. As for the cleanliness of our toweling, false-bottomed backpacks, car trunk, and — for tiny cheeses! — prescription drug bottles? We make no guarantees.

Quebec Legalizes Raw Milk Cheese; Many Americans Rejoice [Serious Eats]
Another good reason to say ‘Cheese’ [Montreal Gazette]

[Photo: raw brie (from Quebec!) via druckfehlerteufel’s Flickr]

Yet Another Reason To Love Canada