France’s youth are turning their noses up at strong cheese, with nine per cent of 18-to-24-year-olds saying they ate none of the dairy product, compared with five per cent of the French population as a whole.

This is according to a study by the OpinionWay Institute for the Académie Phormos, a Parisian association of eminent cheese lovers.

Véronique Richez-Lerouge, president of the Association Fromages de Terroir that promotes traditional unpasteurised cheese, said it was above all a question of “education”.

“At school, young children are now given pasteurised, highly processed cheese that has no taste. And that’s a big problem because taste is something you learn. It’s like reading or anything else, you can’t like something you don’t know,” she told The Telegraph.

This was sad because “when I have done tests with children, they actually love strong cheeses, indeed, they often prefer them. We’re becoming increasingly sanitised, Americanised”.

She also blamed “certain nutritionists who say cheese is too salty, that it’s too bad for you, whereas it has many qualities and industrial cheeses are far worse than raw milk cheeses. But that’s the dominant discourse.”