CALIFORNIA Dairies Set Safety Standards for Raw-Milk Cheese 9-07

Dairies unite to set safety standards for raw-milk cheese
26.sep.07
San Francisco Chronicles
Janet Fletcher

sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/09/26/FD8RS54I4.DTL)

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 story says that 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.

Cary Bryant of Oregon's Rogue Creamery, which makes the acclaimed Rogue River Blue, along with several other blue cheeses from raw milk, was quoted as saying, "It's about us making sure we have our act together. If anything (bad) happens, the whole industry goes down."

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.

Richard Koby, an attorney for the Cheese Importers Association of America, was cited as saying that 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.

Michael Herndon, an FDA spokesman, was cited as saying 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, was cited as saying that the presidium protocols were modeled after traditional European practices, adding, "There's a lot more cheese consumption in Europe, so if there were problems, I think we would be seeing that epidemiologically."

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