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Don't cut the cheese

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Julia Watson

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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.

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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."

Don't cut the cheese

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Julia Watson

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