Italy’s ‘Mad Buffalo’ cheese disease
Italy has its own version of Mad Cow disease. It hasn’t got a name yet, but you could call it Mad Buffalo disease. Buffalo milk, not cow’s milk, is used to make Italy’s finest mozzarella, the rubbery, and expensive, porcelain-white cheese used in pizza and lasagna. Some of the buffalo milk is contaminated with dioxin and sales of mozzarella are down between 30 and 50 per cent. Japan and South Korea this week banned mozzarella imports.
No one I know is buying buffalo mozzarella, most of which comes from the Campania region around garbage-clogged Naples. The Italians are furious. Not only is mozzarella a dietary staple, it is a symbol of Italy’s glorious food culture. Shame on mozzarella translates into shame on Italy.
The Italians blame the Neapolitan Mafia, known as the Camorra, for the mozzarella crisis. They are probably right. The run-off from the Camorra’s illegal toxic dumps in Campania has no doubt contaminated the land and the water in some parts of the region. Dioxins are a known carcinogenic (though there are many types of dioxin, ranging from the relatively benign to the outright deadly). Dozens of buffalo herds have been quarantined because of higher-than-normal dioxin levels have been found in the animals’ milk. Italy has some 250,000 buffalo whose milk is devoted to mozzarella production.
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