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Food Safety - Have the Mice Been Left in Charge of the Cheese?
by Jenny Curtis, HPC member (reprinted from the Feb-Mar 2002 newsletter)About a year ago, stories began appearing in the media announcing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was on the verge of banning all non-pasteurized cheese. Cheeses that would be affected by a ban are imports like Parmesian Reggiano, Roquefort, Swiss Gruyere and real English farmhouse cheddar. American artisanal cheesemakers such as Grafton Village cheddar would also have to change their cheese making process to accommodate pasteurization.
All of these cheeses are aged more than sixty days. For decades the prevailing belief of food scientists was that the aging process kills off pathogenic bacteria (bacteria that can cause illness) such as lysteria and E coli. And history would seem to prove this notion right. There has never been a case of food borne illness associated with Parmesan Reggiano, for example. This is probably because the cheese is very hard and therefore physically protected from outside pathogens and because the process of making parmesan involves heating the milk, although not to the standards legally required to be labeled "pasteurized." Sebastian Cianci, a spokesman for the FDA said in a recent phone interview that a ban has not yet been discussed. According to Cianci, a study was ordered because "a survey of the scientific literature indicated that pathogens survived."
But why not just accept that the government has our best interests at heart and figure that the great cheese makers of the world will come up with pasteurized versions of their products for the American market if the FDA decides to impose a ban? For one thing, such products are likely to be vastly inferior to the ones we are used to. Take for, example the case of the famous soft French cheeses, brie and camembert.
Since World War II the FDA has prohibited the making of or selling of any un-pasteurized cheese that is aged less than sixty days. This means that most Americans have never tasted real camembert or brie, which are made with unpasteurized milk. For those who have tasted these cheeses in France or Europe, they may have noted that the smell and flavor were undeniably richer than these same cheeses at home. In France, soft cheeses are made with unpasteurized milk, because the bacteria transforms the young cheese from a bland pool of butterfat into the creamy, rich, nutty cheese most of the world knows as brie. When brie is made with pasteurized milk, the required bacteria is long dead, so cheese makers have to substitute triple the amount of butterfat to produce the desired creaminess. The cheese maker is still left with the problem of taste. Adding that extra fat helps, but the result is still pretty bland. This is why brie in America is often flavored with mushrooms and garlic, a practice which is viewed as absurd and unnecessary in France. As Steve Jenkins, author of the Cheese Primer, notes, "Be suspicious of any cheese that relies on herbs to flavor it. It is almost always the case that the cheese maker is trying to hide the blandness of the cheese."
Not only does the consumer suffer from forced pasteurization, but small cheese producers would likely suffer as well. The relatively small companies which produce artisanal cheese won't be able to afford to change their production equipment to accommodate new regulations. And what will happen when small companies and individual families no longer make distinctive, carefully-crafted cheese? Big cheese companies will buy up the trademarked names or mass-produce, inferior version of the original which are similar enough to fool most consumers. One shudders to think what Kraft Brand Parmesan Reggiano would be like.
If this sounds paranoid, one needs only look again to the case of the French soft cheese brie and camembert. Real Brie and Camembert in France are name controlled, which means that the exact recipe is set down by law, the region in which it is produced is narrowly defined and no other cheese produced by a different recipe or outside this region can use this name. Real brie is called "Brie de Mieux" and real camembert goes by the stately moniker "Veritable Camembert du Normandy." However, any factory in the world can produce any cheese with or without pasteurized milk and call it "brie" or "camembert" because it does not violate the French law by using the exact name. This means that there are dozens of mass-produced French brie-style cheeses sold in the United States that are elaborate frauds. To show the length cheese makers will go to fool the public, consider the rind. Brie made with unpasteurized milk, ripens from the inside out, producing a mature cheese with the famous white bacterial rind. Brie made with unpasteurized milk, does not form the rind naturally so a harmless form of pennicillin bacteria is sprayed on the cheese in the factory. Consumers are fooled by a product which has a brie rind, shape, similar texture, a French label, an inflated price and assume they are getting a quality cheese. Steve Jenkins lambasts these imports as "the worst value at any cheese counter."
Although no formal ban has been proposed, the Cheese of Choice Coalition, (CCC), a grass-roots organization representing consumers and small manufacturers, has been fighting as if there has, because they think the cards have been stacked against them in advance.
The cheese of choice coalition has been waging war against the FDA in the press. They've enlisted food columnists and critics to decry anyone who proposes to change such gourmet staples as Parmesan Reggiano. A prominent article in the Washington Post, according to CCC spokesman K Dunn Gifford, actually caused enough outrage to get the FDA to do a study. "They were considering a ban based on a reading of the literature," Gifford said in a recent interview. "Their main citation was a study done at the University of South Dakota where pathogens were injected into cheese made with milk that's already been pasteurized. What relevance this had to cheese made with unpasteurized milk, no one could tell."
The CCC also commissioned Dr. Catherine Donnelly of the University of Vermont to do her own reading of the scientific literature. Her conclusions were startlingly different from that of the FDA. Not only did she find it repeatedly stated in the scientific literature that aged cheeses were among the safest food products available, far safer than eggs or meat, but that forced pasteurization might actually cause more food-borne illness than it prevents. If pasteurization kills the harmful bacteria, it also kills the bacteria that feed on harmful bacteria. In other words, it limits the cheeses own natural defenses. One study of a listeria outbreak concluded that the pathogen was probably introduced to the cheese by factory workers after the milk was already pasteurized. This could mean that without the natural defensive bacteria, pasteurized cheese could become a breeding ground for the very bacteria that pasteurization is meant to eliminate.
One might hope that the FDA's findings, due in the Fall of 2002, would match Donnelly's, and the idea of a ban will be dropped. But the Center for Food Safety where the tests are being conducted is a quasi government agency that relies heavily on industry income and participation in their supposedly objective studies. Even a cursory examination of the Center's website reveals their bias. They court industry involvement by promising that for an annual donation of $30,000 "premier members" have more of a voice in the center's findings and are allowed to have corporate scientists participate in studies. The website goes on to state that among their "premier members" are corporate cheese giants like Kraft Foods, Inc.
When I told Gifford at the CCC about the website for National Center for Food Safety he said, "I am not surprised. There is big money behind this. It is an outrage that corporations are allowed to buy their way into a government study like that."
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