It’s World Raclette Day and yet not everyone is going to celebrate this Wednesday in the glory of melted cheese. For what ? Because there are people who can’t stand cheese. Whatever. Far be it from us to judge them. We will not mention here the names of members of the editorial staff of 20 minutes concerned, but know that there are even people for whom cheese is synonymous with hell and damnation. They are tyrophobic.
“Between the smell and the appearance of the melted cheese threads, it’s horror,” admits Pauline, 34 years old. So when raclette season comes, which our reader judges to be “longer and longer”, it’s a daily battle. “Our community is struggling during this very difficult period, it’s a nightmare,” breathes the one who responded to our call for testimonies.
“It’s a terrible season”
Even if nearly a kilo of raclette cheese is eaten in France per year and per person, according to The echoes, for Pauline “it’s a terrible season”. And the thirty-year-old is far from the only one to avoid dinners with friends during the winter. “I hate raclette cheese, I can’t stand the smell and the taste of melted cheese I can’t,” says Nat, 36 years old. “It’s a complicated moment because the French have an obsession with it,” adds Maxime, 34, particularly disgusted by “the dripping melted cheese, the nauseating odor that emanates and the fad of finally getting together around ‘a not very sexy and gargantuan meal during which we stuff our bellies’.
The young Parisian still manages to take it upon himself to no longer miss these friendly evenings with friends. Maxime has his own little techniques for surviving: opening the window and eating everything except cheese. For those who are “unable to eat a piece of any cheese”, there are two very distinct communities of French people: those who love cheese, all cheeses, “a bit like good wine” and those who love it. hate. But that means counting without our tyrophobes, like Karen: “It’s not really something that’s unpleasant for me, but I’m deathly afraid of cheese. »
The worst cheese: Reblochon
“The runny side, the texture, the smell. The whole thing terrifies me to no end. I particularly fear those with rotten foods (Fourme d’Ambert, Roquefort etc.)”, continues our 33-year-old internet user for whom “Emmental and melted raclette are acceptable, once melted correctly and without crust. » The smell of melted cheese, so sweet for some, is also Pauline’s first repellent: “it’s infamous, it smells like an old sock with holes in it. » The worst cheese according to her: Reblochon, “hot or cold”. For Maxime, who hates goat cheese, it is more the process of making cheese that “disgusts” him, “this extension of milk into a solid, the way in which it is done, the transformation of a raw product by a refining and fermentation technique…”
Pauline is convinced that these detractors of cheese “are much more numerous than we think”, and a study has put figures on this feeling. Some 6% of people questioned by researchers from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center say they have an aversion to cheese compared to 2.7% for fish and 2.4% for cold meats.
An aversive stimulus
For the sake of this scientific study published in 2016, experts have indeed looked into this culinary curiosity: the hatred of cheese. They observed in 30 volunteers divided into two equal groups that a part of the brain that reacts to hunger was “totally inactive when presented with an odor and an image of cheese in aversive people”, explains the site of the CNRS.
Furthermore, it seems that reward brain areas are also activated in people who hate cheese when it is presented to them, but in response to an aversive stimulus. Thus, this study suggests that “the reward circuit can also encode disgust”, concludes the CNRS. Texture, taste or smell, no matter where the disgust comes from, it leads Pauline to aversion and makes raclette “unbearable” in all cases.