One of the world's great sensual experiences, exulted in daily across Europe,
is illegal in the United States. That bite you may be about to take into an
unctuous and intense young French raw milk cheese oozing off the edges of a
chewy chunk of bread is against the law.
No raw milk cheese aged for less than sixty days may be imported into this
country, nor sold in this country by local cheesemakers. So say the
regulations of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in force for the past
half-century. Yet since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Americans began
showing an interest in proper cheese, there hasn't been much difficulty in
buying younger raw milk cheese treasures from France, England and Italy in
American specialty food stores. Cheeses were sent without fanfare by FedEx
direct to cheesemongers. But now the U.S. Bioterrorism Act (enacted in
December 2003), which requires advance identifying paperwork for the import of
all consumer goods, is likely to make it impossible any longer to slip these
heavenly gems through the cracks.
And it doesn't stop there: age is no longer the only issue. The FDA is also
considering mandating pasteurization of all cheeses, regardless of origin or
age. This would be damaging enough to foreign exporters for a market as large
as America. But now the regulations may go global. As a result of a proposal
by the United States, the World Health Organization (WHO) is agitating to ban
the sale by member-countries of any raw milk cheeses for trade to any country.
If fully realized, the cumulative effect of these developments would be a
death sentence on the international cheese industry.
The battle for imported cheeses and American-made artisan cheeses alike has
become "pasteurized" versus "raw." The National Cheese Institute, the ninety-
member American dairy industry association which together accounts for
approximately 80 percent of the natural cheese, processed cheese and cheese
products manufactured in the United States, is recommending mandatory
pasteurization for all cheese milk. Artisan cheesemakers, usually small mom-
and-pop entrepreneurs, are under the impression that the option to use raw
milk is a campaign already fought and won in their favor. Not so fast.
According to John Sheehan-director for the Division of Dairy and Egg Safety
within the Office of Plant and Dairy Foods, part of the FDA's Center for Food
Safety and Applied Nutrition-the FDA is "currently investigating all raw milk
cheeses. Evaluation is under way right now; it's a priority this year. It's
going to be comprehensive."
It could mean good-bye to those remarkable and, in many cases, internationally
award-winning raw milk American artisan cheeses, for which the FDA previously
felt that the sixty-day age minimum was adequate to protect the American
consumer. Now they might also have to be pasteurized. Goodbye, too, to
imported raw milk classics like Roquefort and Emmentaler, cook's staples
Parmigiano-Reggiano and Gruyere, and essential standby Cheddar.
If you call the Fromegerie P. Jacquin in La Vernelle in France to speak to
cheesemaker Pascal Jacquin, it's not "La Vie en Rose" that plays in your ear
while you wait, but Pink Floyd's rebellious 1979 song "Another Brick in the
Wall Part 2": "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control."
Just after Christmas, a consignment of his underage award-winning goat cheeses
was turned back to France. And say goodbye to Vacherin Mont d'Or, considered
by many the most majestic of all cheeses. Under the new law, it will not be
found in the United States again. Nor will the youthful Reblochon, Camembert
de Normandie, Monsieur Jacquin's Selles sur Cher, Ste. Maure de Touraine, and
young Valenc ay, and dozens of others from Europe. Rather than compromise the
quality of his fresh young goat cheeses for markets elsewhere, Monsieur
Jacquin is withdrawing them from American sale and instead creating for
special U.S. export a pasteurized cheese he is calling "Rond Tradition." The
real issue, however, is that it could become the only cheese he is allowed to
export, if the who has its way.
Passionate cheese lovers and cheesemakers alike argue that pasteurization, by
eliminating 90 percent of micro flora in the milk, destroys flavor and
produces less complex, more uniform cheeses. Laura Werlin, author of the
cheese bible, The New American Cheese1, is clear that there is a distinction
between pasteurized milk and raw milk cheeses. As she told me, "There are many
wonderful complex pasteurized milk cheeses. But when you get into raw milk,
you get into nuances of taste and flavor that can't possibly be there once the
milk is pasteurized. Pasteurization eliminates beneficial bacteria as well as
unwanted bacteria. Bacteria lend flavor and complexity."
And pasteurization doesn't guarantee to render a cheese safe. It could, in
fact, make cheese more dangerous in some cases, since the natural flora in raw
milk cheese can overcome pathogens.
Until World War II, cheesemaking in the United States, as overseas, was a
local affair. Family dairies made cheeses from the raw milk of the cows they
or their neighbors grazed. The milk, usually from a single source, was always
traceable. When the war came, many cheesemakers were sent overseas to fight,
and those who replaced them were not only less experienced but were expected
to meet a huge government requirement for cheese to fuel the war effort.
Quality and safety were sacrificed for the sake of mass manufacture, and a law
was passed demanding pasteurization in cheesemaking unless the cheese was aged
for sixty days under specified conditions. By 1949, all milk and dairy
products were pasteurized. But, as Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food
safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, points out, the law
"hasn't been enforced." Until now.
Europeans who have been guzzling unpasteurized dairy jewels for hundreds of
years are baffled. Death by raw milk cheese? "It's possible", Smith DeWaal
says. But the trouble is, none of the government institutions involved in the
decision-making seem to agree against what in the raw milk we should be
protected. They are each focused on a different organism. Carol Tucker
Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute of the Consumer Federation of
America, formerly a top regulator at the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA), says that the Centers for Disease Control "does not track illnesses by
food-only by pathogen. Unpasteurized cheese is frequently the source of the
most deadly pathogen Listeria monocytogenes." For John Sheehan's division of
the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, the menace is E. coli,
while the National Research Council's report, "Scientific Criteria to Ensure
Safe Food" cites Salmonella. Each bacterium was the focus of its own
discussion paper at the Food Safety and Inspection Service's 36th session in
early January of the Codex Alimentarius Commission.
Consumers at risk over Listeria in any foodstuff, says Smith DeWaal, are the
elderly and the pregnant (who become vulnerable to miscarriage if it enters
their system). But how many miscarriages have been recorded through raw milk
cheese consumption? None, in point of fact. "It's very hard to track", Smith
DeWaal admits. "Miscarriages usually happen in private." That raw milk cheese
"can kill is an assumption based on the fact that cheese carries Listeria
mystogenes."
Cheeses have been under the microscope, quite literally, since, John Sheehan
says, "[r]ecent research from South Dakota University in 1996 indicated the
sixty-day aging period did not do much at all for E. coli. We have since
confirmed it doesn't do much at all with Cheddar cheese with reference to E.
coli."
When the 1996 South Dakota University's study was published, artisanal
cheesemakers who had had no reports of food-borne illnesses relating to their
own cheeses went to Dr. Catherine Donnelly, a respected food microbiologist
and professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont, to
study the study. When she examined the scientific literature, few of the
disease outbreaks involved unpasteurized, hard cheeses. And in each of the
outbreaks involving hard cheeses, the contamination appeared to have happened
after aging, so pasteurization wouldn't have prevented them. In FDA tests, she
says, pasteurized milk was "super-loaded with E. coli to levels [that] you'd
never experience in the common milk supply."
Things got worse in 2003, when the National Research Council (NRC) published
the report "Scientific Criteria to Ensure Safe Food" which included cheese.
"If you haven't heard about this report yet", read a review in the industry
journal Food Processing,
"there's a good chance you will in the future. . . . Among other reasons, the
report is of interest because it is likely to prompt new legislative authority
for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) to regulate food safety."
For their own protection, artisan cheese producers work to the FDA's HACCP
(Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) standards, though some perhaps
less efficiently than others. Developed by Pillsbury, HACCP standards are
science-based controls applied from the raw material phase to the finished
product in order to prevent hazards that could cause food-borne illnesses in
astronauts in space. Cheesemakers have found that application of HACCP rules
has increased the quality and shelf-life of their artisan cheeses, as well as
reduced their liability insurance. It is not in a small dairy farmer's
interests to operate at less than the highest modern hygiene and production
standards. "Good dairy management and excellent sanitation permit the safe
manufacture of raw milk cheese in a variety of styles", states Debra
Dickerson, the U.S. representative of Britain's Neal's Yard Dairy.
What the NRC's report describes as only a "recommendation" for a sixty-day
holding period for cheese was based on expert testimony provided during
hearings way back in the 1950s. The report concedes, "[t]he scientific
underpinnings of this recommendation are obscure, but appear to be derived at
least partially from a study that investigated survival of B. abortus in
Cheddar cheese." It then confesses that
"Unfortunately, many of the cheeses that were intended for examination in this
part of the study were not tested for the presence of B. abortus as samples
were lost. Further, initial cheese storage period lengths were not
standardized but rather ranged from 41 to 84 days, making it very difficult to
compare results among the cheese."
Despite their own laboratory results, the report says, the expert researchers
"believed that the epidemiological evidence suggesting a lack of association
between cheese consumption and disease provided strong support for an aging
period of approximately two months for commercial cheeses. The final stated
conclusion was that "an aging period of sixty days is reasonable assurance
against the presence of viable B. abortus organisms in Cheddar cheese."
The NRC report cites three outbreaks of cheese-related illnesses, involving
Salmonellosis in mass manufacturing plants. The first was in 1976, traced to
Cheddar manufactured in Kansas. The raw milk had been held without
refrigeration in the processing plant for one to three days prior to
pasteurization and cheese manufacture. "This outbreak resulted from numerous
lapses in good manufacturing practices", it admitted, "and cannot be
attributed solely to inadequacy of a sixty-day holding period for pathogen
reduction." The second involved a series of outbreaks in Ontario between 1980
to 1982, when Salmonella muenster was isolated from raw milk Cheddar even
after 125 days of curing at 41 degrees Fahrenheit. However, in 1985 a
molecular profile was done of the cheese in that outbreak. It was found that
workers sick with Salmonella had been handling cheese with their bare hands.
In the third case, also in Canada and affecting over 2,700 people in 1984,
Salmonella typhimurium was isolated at very low levels from Cheddar cheese
that had been prepared from a mix of raw and pasteurized milk. It was found
that two cows from two different milk herds had shed Salmonella and that one
of the employees had manually overridden the pasteurizer, allowing the raw
milk to be mixed in with the pasteurized. Each of these discoveries shows,
says Dr. Donnelly, that pasteurization won't guarantee safety when workers
can't be relied upon to maintain good production practices.
As to E. coli, "[t]here was a real problem [in the South Dakota study] with
test design." If it were really such a threat in cheeses, she says, "We'd see
people getting really sick." She believes mandating pasteurization in hard
cheeses to be potentially more unsafe than insisting cheesemakers follow HACCP
procedures. "Published studies show problems occur chiefly post-
pasteurization." There is greater hazard, she will agree, in making young
cheeses. Severe outbreaks of illness were associated with Mexican cheeses sold
in California. But these were fresh soft cheeses made at home by amateurs for
sale through street vendors without any proper attention to production
hygiene.
"The issue is not pasteurized cheese versus raw", asserts Debra Dickerson.
"It's about the standards under which cheese is produced. You can have
pasteurized cheese that is lethal." According to the American Cheese
Society-which, following publication of the South Dakota University report,
formed the Cheese of Choice Coalition for the right of individuals to eat
unpasteurized milk cheeses if they wished-between 1948 and 1988, over 100
billion pounds of cheese were produced in the United States. In that forty-
year period of primarily mass-manufactured cheese, six food-borne illness
outbreaks were reported. The highest cause was not raw milk but post-
pasteurization or post-production contamination. In the UK, cheese of all
types including unpasteurized accounts for just 0.1 percent of UK food
poisoning outbreaks. The FDA goal, says Laura Werlin, is "an antiseptic food
supply. But the ramification [of eating] food so sterilized is that when we
catch anything, we won't have immunity."
Max McCalman is the mai tre fromageur of New York's Picholine restaurant, where
cheese is taken as seriously as the other exceptional courses, and of
Artisanal, a cheese bistro. Anxious to pass on his passion and knowledge, he
has also established the Artisan Cheese Center for cheese maturing and
education in Manhattan. But he is woeful about the current regulations. "Over
the past ten years in all our dealings with cheese we have encountered hassles
and frustration in securing rare gems from Europe. Sometimes it's been very
bad, sometimes it's eased somewhat. [But] it doesn't look very good right
now." Though the ban covers only a fraction of all the cheeses he offers, he
cannot feature "those fresh, delicate lovelies. And it's our loss."
It could also become Europe's loss. With the ravenous "global market" jaw
opening ever wider, what is legislated for cheese in the U.S. looks set to
affect artisan cheese production worldwide if the who has its way.
There are a number of issues at play, McCalman thinks. "A little bit of
isolationism in our world right now is part of what drives this. And there's
hysteria." But, McCalman says, "cheese is probably the safest food out there.
It has the most nutrition and is the least hazardous in any way. It's very
free of any GMO [genetically modified organisms] opportunities. What is
required to make real cheese is by and large organic." He goes on to list the
vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants and good things galore that "these beauties"
contain. Then he wonders why the same government research isn't going into the
health properties of fast foods, canned foods, reconstituted foods or snack
foods.
It is not unthinkable to imagine mass-production cheese manufacturers behind
the FDA's focus on artisan cheeses. The U.S. Cheese Industry Association,
which is against raw milk cheese labeling on the grounds that it undermines
consumer confidence in dairy products, drafted a letter dated April 15, 2000,
to its members and board members. Its aim was to rally them to support the
inclusion of language in the Codex Committee on Food Hygiene's Code of Hygiene
Practice for Milk and Milk Products that would require pasteurization for
cheese, something which the Codex did not cover hitherto.
"If adopted as currently drafted, the Milk Code could result in international
pressure on the U.S. government to remove or relax health and safety
standards. Such action would put American consumers at risk and negatively
impact our business. . . . If the standard adopted by Codex leaves out this
language, the European Union will very likely initiate World Trade Association
(WTO) dispute settlement proceedings against the United States. The Europeans
will argue that U.S. standards are higher than those set internationally and
must be justified. A WTO case would likely cost the U.S. cheese industry
between $ 500,000 and up to several million [dollars]."
And it wouldn't be the first time that a U.S. government agency has introduced
regulations which tend to favor big producers over smaller ones. As Rod Dreher
documented in National Review, small producers not only have to compete in the
market place; they must also swim upstream against government regulations.
"State and federal regulations governing the nation's meat and dairy supply
are supposed to guarantee safe, quality food products", he wrote. "But the
rules are actually tailored to benefit mass agriculture producers at the
expense of small farmers."2 It's no surprise that lobbyists for Big Cheese (as
it were) would push for these regulations, even though they do it in the name
of public health. K. Dun Gifford, founder and president of Oldways
Preservation & Exchange Trust-founded in 1988 to promote healthy eating,
encourage sustainable food choices and preserve traditional food ways-has also
alleged that these large manufacturers, which already pasteurize their cheese,
may be behind the FDA's testing regime.
But even if that sounds too Machiavellian, it still seems an awful lot of fuss
about a food you can avoid, if you choose, without ruining a great meal.
Unpasteurized cheese hasn't felled the French, who celebrate cheese as a
course on its own, often twice a day. It's more likely that raw milk cheeses
have contributed to a healthy build-up in their stomachs of usefully
aggressive antibodies. The Surgeon General finds labels sufficient to warn
consumers of the deadly hazards of cigarette smoke. Wouldn't it be simpler to
allay the fears of anyone anxious about the safety of cheese by requiring
informative labeling? "We would look at labeling as a possibility", says Smith
DeWaal, pointing out that similar labeling has been discussed for ready-to-eat
meats that carry the risk of Listeria.
In response to food safety hand-wringing, it's tempting to paraphrase TV
producers' petulant retort to viewers complaining about television content: if
you're worried about death by cheese, don't buy it. Because even that
supermarket orange brick sealed in its sanitary vacuum pack may not be as
innocuous as it looks.
Max McCalman would like to see American artisan cheesemakers allowed to make
their own case for their product. "We have just gone through the best cheese
times this country has ever known. All cheeses, not just 'uncompromised'
cheeses, are selling at an all-time high. The number of makers of cheese has
soared dramatically. This is their survival. So many of them will lose their
jobs" if pasteurization becomes required for all cheese production. "I applaud
the FDA", he says. "On a shoestring budget, they have watched out for our
health by taking samples of many food types." He pauses, then states with some
force, "But lay off the cheese!"National Interest:
