From the Cutting Room Floor - the Death of Lymeswold

Even in a book as vast as my forthcoming work on Britain in the 1990s, there's not room for everything, and some stuff got cut at an early stage. But I'm loath to lose things, so here's a passage from the first draft that got excised:

...The good news came in 1992 when it was announced that production of Lymeswold was to cease. The product had been launched with great fanfare a decade earlier, the first new British cheese for two hundred years, at the behest of the Milk Marketing Board and with the endorsement of the agriculture minister, Peter Walker. It was given a fictitious name that was supposed to evoke an ideal English village ('The Americans are crazy for that sort of thing,' explained a sales director, as British hearts sank) and, rather implausibly, it was intended to be capable of exporting to France, as though that country didn't have enough creamy blue cheeses of its own.

This latter aspect of the project foundered almost immediately when it was discovered that that the word Lymeswold was virtually unpronounceable for the French, but even a rebranding overseas as Westminster Blue didn't help since the product itself was so bland and tasteless. The domestic market was similarly unimpressed, particularly since Lymeswold was more expensive than many imported French cheeses.

After a decade of underperformance, the Milk Marketing Board gave up the struggle and closed down the factory in Birmingham that had been making the stuff, with the loss of thirty-eight jobs.

There was a free-market moral to be learned here, opined The Times in a leading article: 'Politicians and civil servants and nationalised industries have their uses, but cheese-making is not one of them.' Private enterprise, however, was not always much better than the bureaucrats. The following year saw the launch of Emmerdale, an equally unimpressive cheese, in a licensing deal with Yorkshire Television, the company that made the soap opera of the same name. (Its elder soap sister, Coronation Street, had blazed this trail by licensing to Carlsberg Tetley the name of Newton & Ridley, the fictional brewers who supplied the Rover's Return.)

Even beyond such mass-market monstrosities, there were major structural problems with the cheese industry. Britain was importing five times as much 'cheddar' from its European partners as it was exporting, and unpasturised cheese had almost entirely disappeared, hunted out of existence by officials concerned that it breached health and safety guidelines. A 1993 episode of the Lenny Henry sitcom Chef! was centred on the search for under-the-counter unpateurised Stilton.

Hope, however, was at hand, in the shape of an unforeseen boom in dedicated, independent cheese-makers, embraced by a foodie minority in the same way that the real ale campaign was finally winning converts. And increasingly this seemed like the polarised future of food more generally: a rise in highly processed ready-meals (sales grew by 70 per cent in the ten years from 1994), accompanied by a growing diversity of choice at the top end and in the specialist fringes...