CurdNerds

Adding fuel to the fire of the raw milk debate, here's an interesting AP story about Maple Shade Farm, a cheesemaker in Western Massachusettes attempting to build back their business following an FDA recall due to trace amounts of listeria in their Berkshire Blue cheese.

Michael Miller, who runs the creamery, argues that the number of listeria in the cheese was scant, and that the FDA used an incubator as well as a synthetic growth hormone to grow enough bacteria to show up on a test. Even so, apparently as few as 1,000 cells of listeria can cause infection, and given the public health risks, even trace amounts are unsafe.

There is a telling quote in the article from Ihsan Gurdal, owner of Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge. "Gurdal says he stopped selling Berkshire Blue a few years ago because the cheese was inconsistent, coming in either too dry or too creamy. Miller says the variations are caused by seasonal diet changes of the Jersey cows, not by changes in his recipe." This suggests to me that Miller has trouble controlling the moisture content of his cheeses, and high moisture makes for a better bacterial growth medium than low moisture. So whereas a dry raw milk cheese like cheddar might've been able to fight off the growth of listeria during affinage, a blue cheese with too much moisture might provide too good of a growth medium. In that case even aging the cheese past the 60 day minimum required by law might not have been enough to kill all the bacteria present.

In any case, the debate rages on. Raw milk cheese tastes better than cheese made from pasteurized milk. However, if commercial American cheesemakers want to preempt the FDA from banning the sale of all raw milk cheeses in this country, it is incumbent upon them to be extremely careful in their methods of production to prevent any kind of bacterial infestation. The more cases there are, the better the FDA looks when it enacts its prohibition.