Cursed are the cheesemakers

Making mozzarella looks more like a conjuring trick than an industrial process. Buffalo milk curds which have been separated from the whey are first fed through an electric mincer into a broad, low-rimmed wooden tub and bathed in boiling water, then the mozzarella master goes to work: whipping the spongy white mass with a wooden stick, tossing out excess water with a plastic scoop, whipping and tossing until within a few minutes the amorphous, creamy matter has resolved into gleaming, viscous balls.

Alfonso Cutillo, the proprietor of La Baronia buffalo mozzarella factory, breaks off a shiny globule and tosses it my way. In the blink of an eye inedibly acidic buffalo milk curds have been transformed into one of the sweetest, simplest delicacies Italy produces. It's boiling hot and at this point lacks salt, but it's true mozzarella all right, firm, fragrant, delicious, and it squeaks when you chew it. That, says Mr Cutillo, is the true test.

Whether the stuff tastes any different laced with dioxin is a question I have not yet had the misfortune to find out. In the past month, Naples's long-running rubbish crisis, which saw the streets of Italy's third-biggest city submerged under millions of tons of uncollected household refuse, has mutated smoothly into the great mozzarella disaster.

Last week, Italian public health authorities raided buffalo dairies across Campania, the region of which Naples is the capital, and quarantined the herds of 66 after higher-than-permitted levels of dioxins were found in milk from 29 of them.

Dioxins – polychlorinated bibenzodioxins – are organic compounds produced in diesel fumes, burning waste, primitive refuse incinerators, metal smelting and so on, which cause cancers, birth defects and immune system damage in animals. Thanks to industrialisation they are present in every human being alive, and babies who breastfeed are welcomed to planet Earth with a substantial dose (though breast milk's other benefits outweigh that drawbacks).

But ubiquitous though they have become, nobody wants dioxins on their dinner table. And in a clear indication of alarm, Italy's careful and scrupulous consumers have in the past weeks dropped buffalo mozzarella as if it was even hotter than the one Alfonso Cutillo threw to me.

Sales are down 50 per cent across the country. One week ago The Independent devoted its front page to the crisis, and in the following days the alarm went around the world. South Korea then Japan announced that all supplies would be stopped at their borders pending stringent checks, and France said it would take similar steps.

At the end of the week the Italian and European authorities went eyeball to eyeball. On Thursday, the European Commission said the Italian authorities had not yet done enough to combat the problem: there had been no recall of potentially contaminated products, and the surveillance programme on farms in Campania was inadequate. "The Commission has requested the competent Italian authority to take further urgent measures," it said. "If it considers this further action inadequate, the Commission will consider proposing safeguard measures for dairy products originating from the region of Campania." In other words, a ban.

France's agriculture ministry announced yesterday that it had ordered a ban of its own. That was the shock Italy needed: within two hours it had done as the EU demanded, ordering a recall of mozzarella produced by 25 suspect companies in Campania. Promptly the EU withdrew the threat of a Europe-wide ban, and later in the day France lifted its own banning order, too.

So these are torrid times for the normally placid, fragrant business of whipping up mozzarella. And when, unannounced (I had been unable to get through on the phone) I stepped into the office of Alfonso Cutillo's cheese factory in the village of Pontelatone, the Grim Reaper himself could not have elicited a more unwelcoming glare.

La Baronia is one of the elite of Campania's mozzarella producers, a member of the consortium of D O P ("Denominazione di Origine Protetta") manufacturers whose cheese is the best there is – and none of whose members, Mr Cutillo underlines, has come under the slightest suspicion. Mr Cutillo and his cousin Luca started out as dairy farmers, then 22 years ago with local and EU grants set up in the mozzarella business. "We started with 50 litres of milk per day," Mr Cutillo says. "Now we have 35 employees and produce 100kg of cheese per day." Little of their produce goes to Naples – because of the competition, says Mr Cutillo, and the way the market is "in the hands of a few people". Instead they sell in half a dozen posh delicatessens in Rome, and twice a week planes bring fresh La Baronia mozzarella to London, where it sells in selected shops for £15.50 per kilo.

Mozzarella is famous as the topping cheese on pizza, but to melt La Baronia's product would be a crime: Italians eat it raw and as fresh as possible, sliced with tomatoes and basil and the best available olive oil. And the international appetite for mozzarella di buffala has soared in the past decade.

Paco Nicodemo, the director of Nifeislife, the Italian food specialist which imports La Baronia's products, says: "We are the only ones importing mozzarella di buffala into Britain by plane. It's in the air three hours after it's made, and in London we sell it to restaurants like Latium in Berners Street and Riccardo's in Fulham Road as well as in delicatessens. We started importing it many years ago, many people didn't known that mozzarella di buffala DOP was different from all the rest but we taught them, and now it's much appreciated. A lot of English people buy it now."

Despite the bad news from Campania, sales in Britain have held firm so far, says Mr Nicodemo. "We are scared from one day to the next that something can happen," he admitted. "What is happening in Italy risks destroying everything. Maybe 10 per cent of products are not perfect but everyone who belongs to the consortium of DOP producers is very, very serious about their business: at La Baronia, for instance, they have their own in-house food scientist, with her own laboratory."

In Italy, however, La Baronia's sales, like those of the rest of the industry, are in free fall, down 30 per cent overall and 50 per cent in the crucial Roman market. The firm is in trouble and Mr Cutillo knows it. So after the initial glare of horror he recovered quickly, put a fresh mozzarella in front of me than gave me a tour of the factory and took me out to meet the buffaloes. He also introduced me to Anna, his food scientist, who was cool and startlingly beautiful, like the femme fatale in a James Bond film.

What maddens Mr Cutillo is that the whole thing is so unfair. "It's all been blown up out of proportion. We've been victimised by this, penalised when we have no blame."

The dioxin that has been detected in buffalo milk, he said, "may have come from herds which grazed close to the motorway where there is a lot of pollution, or from rubbish that was burned on the outskirts of Naples during the rubbish crisis. Either way it has nothing to do with the countryside here."

La Baronia's farm and factory are located dozens of miles from Naples, in sight of steep mountains and surrounded by unspoiled pastureland. "All the rubbish dumps are a long way away from here," he pointed out. "And in any case all of us who belong to the DOP consortium are subjected to an infinite number of checks by the controlling council and by ASL. The product that arrives in the shops is safe."

The problem, he insists, was small and localised and has already been dealt with responsibly. "A few dozen buffalo farmers had problems and their herds which were quarantined and the milk destroyed. These producers were between Caserta and Naples, farms close to the motorway. All the other farmers in the vicinity were blocked for 10 days because when there is a problem in one place all those in the same area must be checked to see if they have the same problem, too. But there weren't problems with those herds so the controls were lifted.

"The true meaning of the results of the tests," he insists "is not that mozzarella is contaminated with dioxin but that it is not contaminated, because the contamination was caught by the tests. There has been a demonisation of the mozzarella producers by someone who has benefited from it." And Mr Cutillo smells a rat – he suspects that persons unknown in the north, perhaps rival mozzarella producers from outside the DOP area, have played a part in inflating the crisis.

"It's suspicious that there has been an alarm about mozzarella but no alarm about cows' milk. If dioxins are found in mozzarella it's natural to suspect that it would be found in cows' milk too. But this didn't happen. Someone has targeted us," he said.

Sadly for Mr Cutillo and his colleagues, however, the problem is all too real, and is the culmination of decades of political weakness and criminal opportunism. The Campania area has long been blighted by the Camorra, the region's homegrown mafia, "this cancer we have to live with", as Mr Cutillo describes it.

The Camorra has for many years played a dominant role in waste disposal, earning fortunes from northern firms by trucking their hazardous waste down south then dumping it in improvised landfills. From there it is feared that it entered the food chain, providing one explanation for the presence of dioxin. When the authorities seized the waste disposal business back from the gangs, they found themselves with a chronic shortage of legitimate dumps: hence the crisis which has enveloped Naples repeatedly in recent years, with rubbish piled in the streets and frustrated citizens setting it alight.

So the mozzarella crisis has emerged not in isolation but as the crowning episode in a long narrative – the symbolic retribution visited on the community for their sin of consorting with criminals, of dealing with the devil. With its appearance of virginal purity, its high price and its international reputation, mozzarella di buffala DOP makes the perfect victim. It's a compelling narrative, however unfair.

"What we need now," says Mr Cutillo, as we say goodbye to his buffaloes, "is for the politicians to make a stand and the institutions to come out and make it clear that the problem has been dealt with. Because there have been so many conflicting reports that people don't know what to believe. Then it needs to disappear from the newspapers and the TV. Because if it carries on like this it will be a disaster."