Outside Magazine has a good breakdown of the...

High-res

Outside Magazine has a good breakdown of the ongoing FDA non-toxigenic E. coli issue, and the new regulatory environment in which cheese makers and mongers find themselves:

The FDA Is Coming for Your Cheese
To understand the problem, we have to go back to 2010. At the urging of the American Dairy Products Institute (the dairy lobby group, which did not respond to my interview request), the raw-milk cheese standard was eliminated. This meant all cheese—regardless of its pasteurization status—has to meet the same “health” benchmark. Where raw-milk cheeses could once have up to 100 mpn of nontoxigenic E. coli, now it could have only 10 mpn per gram.
The biggest problem with the rule is that nontoxigenic E. coli are exactly that—not toxic. Of all the things that could kill you in this world, nontoxigenic E. coli is not on the list. It’s not even on the list of the things that could make you barf. But the FDA uses nontoxigenic E. coli as an indicator organism. It assumes that if these microorganisms are there, then more sinister pathogens are also lurking within the food.
In 2013, the FDA began sampling 1,600 varieties of raw-milk cheese. The FDA said this random sampling was simply the agency’s effort to comply with the law. But to cheese producers, it felt personal. Considering there had been no widespread foodborne illnesses related to cheese in the past year (unlike melons and nut butters), many wondered why the FDA was singling out a relatively small industry.
The sampling isn’t completed yet, but the effects are already being felt. With the more stringent standards for nontoxigenic E. coli, many cheesemakers and cheese importers are worried that the risks of having their products deemed “unsafe” outweigh the benefits of producing raw-milk cheeses.

Read the full post.