Cheese is a serious business in France. General de Gaulle once famously remarked that it is impossible to govern a country that produces 246 different varieties of the stuff. If any product symbolises the visceral attachment so many French people have to their terroir, it is cheese.
Martine Urvoy will never forget July 3, 1995, the night she was told her husband, Francois, a Breton seaweed fisherman, had been lost at sea. For five terrible hours she had no news of his fate. Finally at daybreak, Francois was found clinging to a rock in the treacherous waters off Brittany’s northern coast.