Exciting news from across the Channel: a viral cheese has dropped, but good luck spelling or pronouncing it. As Libération reports, la cancoillotte, a liquid cheese from Franche-Comté in eastern France, is taking over fitness social media thanks to its 16g of protein per 100g, low fat content, and bargain price. Its secret ingredient is metton, a skimmed milk product traditionally a byproduct of butter-making repurposed by thrifty peasants to avoid waste.
The Rise of Cancoillotte
Those Franc-Comtois peasants could hardly have imagined where their waste-not-want-not gloop would end up. In April, 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 traveled more than 300 miles on a pilgrimage to Franche-Comté. Julie Morin, president of the association for the promotion of cancoillotte, called online enthusiasm for the product “incredible,” while supermarket Carrefour told Libération sales of the garlic variety rose 16% last month.
A Cultural Betrayal?
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.
