The FDA tried to ban the use of wooden boards in aging cheese but seems to be backing down.
Pretty soon they will tell us we cannot have dry aged beef due to the microbial activity on the surface.
Hope the backing down sticks
Why stop there? The FDA should ban selling any raw meat to consumers because they might cook it at too low a temperature or leave it out too long. Only pre-cooked irradiated meat should be allowed!
I’m all for sensible regulation but some bureaucrats feel they need to justify their jobs by issuing ever more regulations whether sensible or not.
Would be a more compelling argument from the cheese makers if they could say why they need wooden boards, other than Europe/tradition dictates.
They have invested significant money in facilities using wooden boards, during a period which the FDA didn’t object. An FDA rule change would normally include a period of public comment when traditional cheese makers could voice their objections, but in this case the FDA rules haven’t actually changed. This was an arbitrary change based on the whim of a bureaucrat which circumvented public comment. If you owned a business which had been making a food product safely for years, would you want to shoulder the burden of disproving the FDA’s claim?
Except from a review of Michael Pollan’s “Cooked”:
The star of this show is the cheese nun, Sister Noella Marcellino, of the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Litchfield County, Connecticut. She makes a version of Saint-Nectaire cheese using an old wooden barrel and a beech-wood paddle that are happy hosts to countless bacteria.
When a cheese inspector balked at the absence of stainless steel, the fervent fermenter made two batches, one in her wooden tub and one in germ-free metal, and inoculated both with E. coli. The sterile vat’s finished cheese was rife with the bug, while the wooden one had almost none. Good bacteria in the old barrel had created “an environment in which (the E. coli) couldn’t survive.” The inspector relented.