East Midlands’ MEP promotes the region’s cheeses in British Cheese Week

East Midlands’ Conservative MEP Emma McClarkin is celebrating British Cheese Week. The East Midlands is well known for its variety of high quality cheeses with products such as Stilton, Buxton Blue, Lincolnshire Poacher and Red Leicester firm national favourites.

Emma McClarkin encourages all to take advantage of the region’s cheese products. Earlier this year she relished the opportunity she had to visit the Long Clawson Dairy, a producer of Stilton. Emma highlights the European legislation which ensures that Stilton is a product of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). The purpose of this legislation is to ensure the quality and origin of our famous “Stilton” cheese from dairies within Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

Emma McClarkin is passionate about ensuring that only East Midlands’ food produced in the region is labelled as from the area. Consequently, she is a great supporter of the Conservative Party’s campaign for honest food which believes that consumers should be free to choose food from any country, but that real choice requires real information with truthful labelling.

There is a wider benefit of the PDO legislation. As a spokesman from the Long Clawson Dairy adds ‘this legislation is not only beneficial to the manufacturers of Stilton but also the local farmers as true Stilton can only be produced from milk from Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire’.

With the global dairy crisis hitting the region’s dairy farmers hard with closures such as Boultham Park Dairy, Emma McClarkin emphasises that British Cheese Week is a fantastic opportunity to support all aspects of your area’s dairy industry – the manufacturers and the farmers.