I was hoping to order a favorite French cheese for an upcoming class, but the distributor had unwelcome news for me. “We haven’t had it for months,” she said. “The producer stopped making it.” Her reporting turned out to be largely, but not entirely, accurate. There was more to the story.

Jeune Autize, the sublime French goat cheese with a line of ash down the middle, is definitely MIA at American cheese counters. The reasons are two-fold, and both leave me shaking my head. Why do bad things happen to good cheeses?

If you’ve tasted Jeune Autize, you surely recall it. It looks like Morbier—same shape, same damp washed rind—but it’s paler inside. That’s because it’s made with goat’s milk instead of the raw cow’s milk required for Morbier. The cheeses have a similar supple texture, but Jeune Autize is smaller, sweeter and nuttier.

For several years, the Morbier PDO consortium has been waging a legal battle against other cheeses with internal ash. One major target was the producer of Montboissié, a Morbier look-alike made with pasteurized cow’s milk. After losses in two lower courts, Team Morbier received a ruling in its favor in late 2022. The central ash vein—coupled with other characteristics like shape, rind and texture—defined Morbier and merited protection, said the judge. Similar-looking cheeses might confuse the consumer and were, effectively, riding on the coattails of the Morbier PDO brand. In the wake of that decision, Montboissié got a makeover: It now has two burgundy-hued lines, produced with wine grape paste.

Sue Sturman, a Paris-based cheese educator and translator for Profession Fromager, says that the Morbier consortium isn’t the only one to rigorously police visual features. Beaufort, with its unusual cinched waist, is another. “I know for sure that it's not possible to purchase Beaufort molds if you are not part of the PDO,” says Sturman.

But Morbier did not limit its objections to cow’s milk competitors. About a year ago, the consortium also launched proceedings against Jeune Autize, despite the obvious differences. To defuse the threat, the goat cheese producer added another line of ash, says Owen Rumiano, export manager for Rodolphe Le Meunier, the esteemed affineur behind Jeune Autize.

Crisis averted…briefly. In recent months, the FDA has started flagging imported ashed cheeses again, presumably because the ash is not approved for food use.

Stephanie Ciano, vice president of international purchasing for World’s Best Cheese, says she’s aware of only one European ash supplier with GRAS (generally recognized as safe) certification, an FDA requirement for food additives. She has advised all the French cheesemakers she works with to use this vendor, and it’s unclear why they would risk doing otherwise.

Still, about six months ago, the FDA blocked a shipment of ashed goat cheese shipped by Le Meunier. “They initially said it was for labeling errors,” said Rumiano. “Then they asked for the ash spec sheets. We were sure our ash was the accepted one but apparently not.”

With so much uncertainty, Le Meunier is no longer sending any ashed cheeses to the U.S., including my longed-for Jeune Autize. “If we get too many flags, our exporter number would get blacklisted,” says Rumiano.

It’s a mystery why the FDA is so fixated on ash, an ingredient used in and on cheese for centuries and approved repeatedly by European food-safety authorities. But it’s no mystery why French producers would not want to risk sending these cheeses. In the meantime, importers are left scrambling to fill holes in their product line and wondering what the FDA will target next.