WE WON THE ĠBEJNA BATTLE: NOW LET’S STOP SELLING THE COW

By Anna Marie

Malta finally got its ġbejna tan-nagħaġ protected at European level. After years of applications, arguments and bureaucratic wrangling, the European Commission registered the cheese as a Protected Designation of Origin in January 2025.

The rules are clear: Ġbejna tan-nagħaġ means cheese made from sheep’s milk, produced and processed in the Maltese islands. Full stop.

So why, if the product is worth fighting Brussels for, is there still concern about cow’s milk finding its way into cheese sold to consumers as the real thing? The answer is brutally simple: money.

Sheep’s milk is a relatively scarce, specialised raw material. Cow’s milk comes from a much larger and more efficient dairy industry and can be cheaper per unit of useful milk solids. Add the cost of keeping sheep, feeding them, milking them and producing a small-scale traditional cheese, and the temptation to stretch the product with cheaper bovine milk becomes obvious. That is precisely why milk adulteration is a known problem. Specialist sheep and goat products command a premium and are therefore obvious targets for substitution with cheaper cow’s milk.

Detecting it is hardly science fiction. Authorities can use ELISA immunological tests or PCR/DNA methods to identify cow’s milk in sheep’s milk and cheese. These methods have specifically been developed to detect and quantify bovine milk adulteration. More sophisticated techniques, including electrophoresis and NMR, can also be used.

So what is stopping us? Not necessarily technology. Not necessarily the law. Malta already has a Food Fraud Unit whose stated purpose is to investigate deliberate deception for economic gain, including adulteration and mislabelling.

The uncomfortable question is whether we have the will to enforce the standards we proudly fought to obtain. Because this is bigger than cheese. It is the Maltese “U iwa!” mentality: yes, yes, we’ll do it somehow. We launch projects, celebrate the announcement, and print the logo. Afterwards,the hard, boring bit of checking, policing and maintaining standards becomes somebody else’s problem.

That is the half-baked culture. And nowhere should we be less half-baked than in food. Our culinary heritage is one of the few things we genuinely own. If we cannot protect the integrity of a humble ġbejna, after securing European legal protection for it, what exactly are we protecting?

We spent years telling Europe that sheep’s milk matters. Yet at home we have tolerated a market in which consumers can struggle to know what milk they’re actually buying. If ‘sheep’s milk’ is the selling point, then cow’s milk is not an innocent ingredient. It is the bait-and-switch.

The University of Malta’s T-Cheesimal research project says that the traditional ġbejna is progressively being lost because commercially produced cheeselets may use sheep’s, cow’s and goat’s milk in varying proportions.

Winning PDO status was the hard part. Now comes the part that actually matters: making sure the cheese deserves the name.