Hold Onto Your Cheese

Cheese in Paris - how many of these would the FDA let me eat?

The Los Angeles Times reported today that the FDA is doing another crackdown on raw milk cheese.

The FDA is unreasonably obsessed with the bacteria in raw milk. There is a bacteria called nontoxigenic E. coli that lives in every human gut. In fact, without it, we cannot digest our food properly. Too many antibiotics wipe it out. But the FDA has decided that nontoxigenic E.coli is a marker for sanitation: too much of this bacteria we all have means dirty food. So they arbitrarily lowered their standards for non-toxigenic E.coli in cheese from 100 MPN (most probably number)  to 10 MPN.

Goodbye French cheese. And goodbye a lot of excellent made-in-America cheese.

Of course this is the same FDA that found that pink slime (ground up parts of meat you don't want to think about) has too much bacteria, but that if it's treated with ammonia it is safe for human consumption.

Somehow cheese made in a many hundred-year-old tradition is not safe. (Did you see that the bacteria they are talking about is nontoxigenic?)

I wish they would spend their time regulating new-fangled "foods" like gmos and artificial flavorings and colorings, instead of harassing makers of real old food.

When we were in Dublin a few years ago, I talked to a cheesemonger (from Waterford) who cut me some pieces of Irish cheese to take home, and then shared with me tastes of "illicit" cheeses - those made from raw milk that customs would not allow me to bring back to the US. They were all raw milk cheese, and they were delicious. I was obviously not the first American he had shared this craziness with.