Don't Cut the Cheese
Mini Teaser: No more Brie, no more Stilton, no more Gorgonzola. Just what have Washington and Brussels got against cheese? Don't you know there's a war on?
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 Valençay, 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 Cheese, 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 maître 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." 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!"
Julia Watson is a food writer and novelist living in Washington, DC.
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