Exciting news from over the Channel: a viral cheese has dropped, but good luck spelling, or saying, it. As Libération reports, la cancoillotte (even native speakers struggle with the pronunciation, apparently), a liquid cheese from Franche-Comté in the east, is taking over fitness social media, thanks to its 16g of “prot” per 100g (as the French muscle bros and girls say), low fat content and bargain price. Its secret ingredient is a skimmed milk product, metton, traditionally a byproduct of butter-making repurposed by thrifty peasants to avoid waste.
Those Franc-Comtois(es) peasants could hardly have imagined where their waste-not-want-not gloop would end up. In April, the social media personality Johan Papz said that discovering cancoillotte was “the best day of my life”, flamboyantly flinging the pale ooze over a plate of potatoes like a moister Salt Bae, then flashing the abs its impressive macronutrients allowed him to cultivate. Another cancoillotte-fluencer has made 178 TikToks on the topic and travelled more than 300 miles on a pilgrimage to Franche-Comté. Julie Morin, the president of the association for the promotion of cancoillotte, called online enthusiasm for the product “incredible”, while the supermarket Carrefour told Libération sales of the garlic variety (of course) rose 16% last month.
But watching endless social media videos of people in Gymshark vests and crop tops manipulating cancoillotte has left me feeling queasy. For a start, I’m a cheese-hater and its eerie texture creeps me out: it’s like a whey-based slime; fondue’s sinister skinny cousin; a low-fat lactose ectoplasm.
But I also feel vaguely culturally betrayed: aren’t French people supposed to care about taste above macros and lean muscle mass? I’m absolutely not suggesting there’s an entirely body-positive, pleasure-forward culture over there: a cursory glance at French women’s magazines, where the spring-summer “régime maillot” (swimsuit diet) full of 0% fat yoghurts appears as reliably as apple blossom, would disabuse anyone of that notion. But what about the “art of living” and savouring-the-finer-things dream they’ve been selling the world for decades?
I’m with Escoffier: “Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness,” and slopping supermarket cancoillotte on to chicken breasts for gym #gains just feels end-of-days depressing.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist