Post by dav on Oct 21, 2007 17:08:51 GMT -5
This item was linked through the Mercola.com website.
Presently raw milk cheese is legal in the States, as long as it is aged at least 60 days. It appears that the FDA may be in the process of changing that.
SFGate
Food Conscious: Dairies unite to set safety standards for raw-milk cheese
Janet Fletcher, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Hoping to head off regulation that might make their products illegal, several prominent American dairies, including Redwood Hill Farm in Sebastopol, have formed the Raw Milk Cheesemakers Association.
The association aims to ensure the safety of domestic cheeses made from unpasteurized milk by helping members implement safe manufacturing practices.
For consumers with a taste for these cheeses - among them Redwood Hill's goat feta and Jasper Hill Farm's Constant Bliss - the new group may help keep their favorites available. And for raw-milk cheesemakers eager to make the safest product possible, the RCMA could provide expertise.
"It's about us making sure we have our act together," says Cary Bryant of Oregon's Rogue Creamery, which makes the acclaimed Rogue River Blue, along with several other blue cheeses from raw milk. "If anything (bad) happens, the whole industry goes down."
Raw-milk cheeses are made with milk that has not been subjected to pasteurization, a heat treatment that destroys pathogens. Many cheesemakers prefer working with raw milk because it contains bacteria beneficial for cheesemaking. Pasteurization destroys these desirable bacteria along with the pathogens.
Jasper Hill's Bayley Hazen Blue, Fiscalini Farms Cheddar and Wisconsin's Pleasant Ridge Reserve are all raw-milk cheeses; so are Parmigiano Reggiano, Comte and Roquefort.
At least half the cheeses on the cart at Gary Danko, the San Francisco restaurant, are made with raw milk, says the restaurant's cheese buyer, David Barriball, as are an estimated 25 percent of the cheeses at Berkeley's Cheese Board.
Current Food and Drug Administration regulations allow the production of raw-milk cheese as long as the cheese is matured longer than 60 days. Aged cheeses - low in moisture and high in acid - do not typically provide the conditions that pathogens such as listeria and salmonella need to survive.
But in its own tests using milk inoculated with pathogens, the FDA has found pathogens surviving in aged cheese, prompting some cheesemakers to worry that the FDA might throw out the 60-day rule and ban all raw milk cheeses, aged or not.
According to Richard Koby, an attorney for the Cheese Importers Association of America, a new FDA working group is developing a risk profile for cheeses of various types.. Another group is looking specifically at the risk of listeria in bloomy-rind cheese.
The new RMCA will try to ensure an impeccable safety record for raw-milk cheeses by helping members implement plans for safe manufacturing.
It will also encourage its members to follow the stringent protocols of the American Raw Milk Cheese Presidium, a Slow Food-sponsored group that mandates humane animal husbandry, sustainable land management and testing of all finished cheese for pathogens.
"Right now, nobody is required to test anything," says Bice, who does test her raw-milk cheeses for pathogens. It aggravates her that the FDA might mandate pasteurization rather than work with producers to define ways to make raw-milk cheese safely.
"They don't think that way," says Bice about the FDA.
Michael Herndon, an FDA spokesman, says the raw-milk cheese industry will have the chance to comment on the FDA's risk profiles.
Even so, wrote Herndon in an e-mail, "For some raw-milk cheeses, there may be no such thing as a set of protocols that will make them safe. It may well be that one outcome for us is that some cheeses will have to be made from pasteurized milk or thermized milk." Thermisation is a heat treatment that stops short of pasteurization.
Catherine Donnelly, professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont and an RMCA scientific adviser, says that the presidium protocols were modeled after traditional European practices. "There's a lot more cheese consumption in Europe," says Donnelly, "so if there were problems, I think we would be seeing that epidemiologically."
Virtually all bloomy-rind cheeses sold in the United States are already made with pasteurized milk because their lifespan is typically shorter than 60 days. A ban on raw-milk bloomy-rind cheeses would have modest impact, although Jasper Hill's Constant Bliss would be one casualty.
"As a retailer, I'd like to see everything just stay the same," says Cathy Strange, global cheese buyer for Whole Foods Markets. "We want to be able to offer American consumers flavorful raw-milk products."
According to Koby, the FDA fears that the 60-day rule is based on old science that no longer holds up. New regulations could follow if the risk profiles, scheduled for completion by fall 2008, suggest that current rules don't protect public health. In that event, the Raw Milk Cheesemakers Association could have a lifespan shorter than some cheeses.
On the Web: For more information on the new association, go to www.rawmilkcheese.org.
E-mail Janet Fletcher at jfletcher@sfchronicle.com. Read previous Food Conscious coverage at sfgate.com/food.
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/26/FD8RS54I4.DTL
This article appeared on page F - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc. | Privacy Policy | Feedback | RSS Feeds | FAQ | Site Index | Contact SFGate
Presently raw milk cheese is legal in the States, as long as it is aged at least 60 days. It appears that the FDA may be in the process of changing that.
SFGate
Food Conscious: Dairies unite to set safety standards for raw-milk cheese
Janet Fletcher, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Hoping to head off regulation that might make their products illegal, several prominent American dairies, including Redwood Hill Farm in Sebastopol, have formed the Raw Milk Cheesemakers Association.
The association aims to ensure the safety of domestic cheeses made from unpasteurized milk by helping members implement safe manufacturing practices.
For consumers with a taste for these cheeses - among them Redwood Hill's goat feta and Jasper Hill Farm's Constant Bliss - the new group may help keep their favorites available. And for raw-milk cheesemakers eager to make the safest product possible, the RCMA could provide expertise.
"It's about us making sure we have our act together," says Cary Bryant of Oregon's Rogue Creamery, which makes the acclaimed Rogue River Blue, along with several other blue cheeses from raw milk. "If anything (bad) happens, the whole industry goes down."
Raw-milk cheeses are made with milk that has not been subjected to pasteurization, a heat treatment that destroys pathogens. Many cheesemakers prefer working with raw milk because it contains bacteria beneficial for cheesemaking. Pasteurization destroys these desirable bacteria along with the pathogens.
Jasper Hill's Bayley Hazen Blue, Fiscalini Farms Cheddar and Wisconsin's Pleasant Ridge Reserve are all raw-milk cheeses; so are Parmigiano Reggiano, Comte and Roquefort.
At least half the cheeses on the cart at Gary Danko, the San Francisco restaurant, are made with raw milk, says the restaurant's cheese buyer, David Barriball, as are an estimated 25 percent of the cheeses at Berkeley's Cheese Board.
Current Food and Drug Administration regulations allow the production of raw-milk cheese as long as the cheese is matured longer than 60 days. Aged cheeses - low in moisture and high in acid - do not typically provide the conditions that pathogens such as listeria and salmonella need to survive.
But in its own tests using milk inoculated with pathogens, the FDA has found pathogens surviving in aged cheese, prompting some cheesemakers to worry that the FDA might throw out the 60-day rule and ban all raw milk cheeses, aged or not.
According to Richard Koby, an attorney for the Cheese Importers Association of America, a new FDA working group is developing a risk profile for cheeses of various types.. Another group is looking specifically at the risk of listeria in bloomy-rind cheese.
The new RMCA will try to ensure an impeccable safety record for raw-milk cheeses by helping members implement plans for safe manufacturing.
It will also encourage its members to follow the stringent protocols of the American Raw Milk Cheese Presidium, a Slow Food-sponsored group that mandates humane animal husbandry, sustainable land management and testing of all finished cheese for pathogens.
"Right now, nobody is required to test anything," says Bice, who does test her raw-milk cheeses for pathogens. It aggravates her that the FDA might mandate pasteurization rather than work with producers to define ways to make raw-milk cheese safely.
"They don't think that way," says Bice about the FDA.
Michael Herndon, an FDA spokesman, says the raw-milk cheese industry will have the chance to comment on the FDA's risk profiles.
Even so, wrote Herndon in an e-mail, "For some raw-milk cheeses, there may be no such thing as a set of protocols that will make them safe. It may well be that one outcome for us is that some cheeses will have to be made from pasteurized milk or thermized milk." Thermisation is a heat treatment that stops short of pasteurization.
Catherine Donnelly, professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont and an RMCA scientific adviser, says that the presidium protocols were modeled after traditional European practices. "There's a lot more cheese consumption in Europe," says Donnelly, "so if there were problems, I think we would be seeing that epidemiologically."
Virtually all bloomy-rind cheeses sold in the United States are already made with pasteurized milk because their lifespan is typically shorter than 60 days. A ban on raw-milk bloomy-rind cheeses would have modest impact, although Jasper Hill's Constant Bliss would be one casualty.
"As a retailer, I'd like to see everything just stay the same," says Cathy Strange, global cheese buyer for Whole Foods Markets. "We want to be able to offer American consumers flavorful raw-milk products."
According to Koby, the FDA fears that the 60-day rule is based on old science that no longer holds up. New regulations could follow if the risk profiles, scheduled for completion by fall 2008, suggest that current rules don't protect public health. In that event, the Raw Milk Cheesemakers Association could have a lifespan shorter than some cheeses.
On the Web: For more information on the new association, go to www.rawmilkcheese.org.
E-mail Janet Fletcher at jfletcher@sfchronicle.com. Read previous Food Conscious coverage at sfgate.com/food.
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/26/FD8RS54I4.DTL
This article appeared on page F - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2007 Hearst Communications Inc. | Privacy Policy | Feedback | RSS Feeds | FAQ | Site Index | Contact SFGate