Dartblog

I have commented in past posts on the striking taste and texture difference between milk straight from the cow and industrial-dairy milk, and the superiority of unpasteurized apple cider over the pasteurized sort. And one day I might voice at length my regret that the Hanover Co-op no longer sells fresh-squeezed orange juice — as they did for many years without incident — because of yet another FDA regulation.

But today let’s look at raw milk cheese (au lait cru on the cover depicted above of a Camembert that I bought two weeks ago in Paris) vs. cheese made with pasteurized milk. The subject came up recently in Wine & Spirits Magazine.

In France, young cheese made with raw milk is very common, and the the Wine & Spirits article well documents the biology/chemistry behind its superior flavor. But in the U.S.A., by FDA edict, all cheese made with raw milk must be aged for at least 60 days prior to sale.

The only logical reason for such a law, at least as it seems to me, is that large-scale cheese producers, who purchase their milk from dozens of sources, don’t want to do the work to ensure the purity of the milk that they buy. High volume sterilization makes manufacturing easier for them, and so much the better if the law eliminates competition from artisanal cheese producers who use raw milk.

As for safety issues, France (and other European countries) have been allowing the sale of raw milk cheeses for many centuries. One would think than an experiment involving tens of million of subjects over hundreds of years would have generated enough data to satisfy the FDA’s scientists and regulators. But then perhaps science is not the FDA’s real concern here.

Addendum: Read about efforts in the U.S. to illegally circumvent FDA restrictions here and here .