What the FDA Doesn’t Know About Farming and Food Could Fill an Encyclopedia
By Alliance for Natural Health
This time they try to save us from some of the most delicious and healthy cheeses.
A few weeks ago, we reported on the continuing ramifications of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which gave the FDA unprecedented power over farms and food producers. We told you how the agency’s FSMA rulemaking on “spent grain” threatened the livelihood of small breweries and farmers by interfering with millennia-old practices.
Having backed off, at least for now, on its spent grain rule, the FDA chose another target: artisanal cheese.
On June 7, the FDA announced it would no longer permit American cheese makers to age cheese on wooden boards or shelving. The decree came quietly, in response to a request for clarification from the New York Department of Agriculture: the FDA had cited several New York cheese producers for the use of wooden boards.
The response, issued by Monica Metz, head of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition’s Dairy and Egg Branch, stated that the use of wooden boards is unsanitary and violates the FDA’s Current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) regulations, because:
Wooden shelves or boards cannot be adequately cleaned and sanitized. The porous structure of wood enables it to absorb and retain bacteria, therefore bacteria generally colonize not only the surface but also the inside layers of wood. The shelves or boards used for aging make direct contact with finished products; hence they could be a potential source of pathogenic microorganisms in the finished products.
Interestingly, the FDA claimed that this wasn’t a new policy, but rather a mere “clarification” of already-established FSMA rules. One could certainly interpret this as an intentional bypassing of the public rulemaking process, as well as an exploratory flexing of the agency’s new FSMA muscles. According to Rob Ralyea of Cornell University, the FDA has previously referred cheese inspections to the states, but “this has all obviously changed under FSMA.”
Does the FDA have a legitimate concern when it comes to aging cheese on wooden boards? Is it true that they can’t be “adequately cleaned or sanitized?” Simply put, no. As thoroughly documented by the American Cheese Society, there are a number of effective ways that wooden boards can be safely cleaned.
Even if there was some increased risk, many consumers would still choose artisanal cheese. As detailed in Cheese Underground and echoed by the cheese trade groups, some of “the most awarded and well-respected” American artisanal cheeses are aged on wooden boards, since it brings a richer, more complex flavor that can’t be duplicated when aged on other materials. In fact, many artisan cheese recipes are specifically formulated to be aged on wooden boards. This rule could have irreparably harmed thousands of small artisans and businesses.
It would also have further restricted American citizens’ access to imported cheeses since, under FSMA, a producer importing cheese to the US is held to the same standards as American producers. (You may recall that last year, in a frenzy over raw milk and unpasteurized cheese, the FDA shut down the importation of most fine European cheeses. This followed other moves to stop the import of European cheeses over the years.)
The public backlash against the prohibition of wooden boards was swift and immediate. So much so, that on June 11—just four days after the initial story broke—the FDA backpedaled by denying it had said what it clearly had said on the wooden board controversy:
The FDA does not have a new policy banning the use of wooden shelves in cheese-making, nor is there any FSMA requirement in effect that addresses this issue. Moreover, the FDA has not taken any enforcement action based solely on the use of wooden shelves.
This is playing with semantics: while the FDA hasn’t taken enforcement action solely on the use of wooden shelves, they have chastised cheese makers for wooden boards in broader citations. The agency has used this tactic before—quietly slipping a significant policy change in a much longer warning letter—in an attempt to limit consumer free speech on the Internet.
Perhaps the FDA is testing the limits of its new FSMA powers. After all, this is the second time in 2014 that the FDA has indicated an alarming new twist in FSMA policy, only to backtrack and claim otherwise after intense public pushback.
Whatever the FDA’s intentions, we need to keep pushing back on new and unreasonable FSMA rules. It’s essential in the fight to protect small farmers and producers, as well as our access to wholesome, local, and non-industrialized foods.
Food Safety Dispute Over Listeria Certain to Keep FDA Pursuing Small Cheese Producers
by: David Gumpert
The Complete Patient
Excerpts:
I can virtually guarantee that the FDA’s challenge to cheese makers—prove to us that what you are doing is safe—will be virtually impossible for the cheese makers to accomplish. If cheese makers somehow do pull it off and convince the FDA to accept wood cheese boards, then there will be another similar issue over the threat of pathogens that will cause the FDA to continue after small artisanal cheese makers. Here is why:
The supposed safety problem isn’t over wood boards, it is over the FDA’s approach to the pathogen listeria monocytogenes (L monocytogenes). The FDA has a zero-tolerance approach to L monocytogenes—or, at least, L monocytogenes that crops up at small cheese producers. Because L monocytogenes is so prevalent in our environment, trying to get rid of every last cell in an artisanal cheese facility, which depends on the interaction of beneficial bacteria, can be nearly impossible. Moreover, the agency fails to provide any guidance to producers about what needs to be done to rectify the situation, and when a producer can’t come up with a solution, the FDA keeps it shut down.
The supposed problems with the New York producer at the center of the wood-board issue of last week is much the same scenario that was used to shutter the award-winning Estrella Creamery in Washington, and the highly popular Morningland Dairy in Missouri, both in cases that originated in 2010. These were thriving, growing examples of small cheese producers, capitalizing on the growing popularity of artisanal cheese, destroyed by the FDA over the presence of L monocytogenes.
For the last two years, it’s been the same M.O. at Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese in upstate New York—a proud dairy making raw-milk cheese, being hammered nearly into oblivion.
The confusion of Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese co-owner, Nancy Taber Richards, trying to satisfy the FDA, is much the same as for those other cheese makers. She told the NY Times: “It was kind of like trying to hit a moving target in the dark. I never knew explicitly what they wanted done.”
Eventually, the FDA would write New York agriculture officials that this case suggested a problem with Finger Lakes Farmstead’s wood boards, and that was what triggered all the media handwringing trying to read the FDA’s mind.
Now, what do all these cases have in common, besides bringing the full wrath of the FDA down on honest hard-working farmers?
Here’s a hint: Ask how many people were sickened from the wonderful cheeses produced at any of these farms (Estrella, Morningland Dairy, Finger Lakes Farmstead). That’s right. Zero.
Wait, you might say, the FDA can’t take any chances. This is L monocytogenes, after all. As the state prosecutor in the Morningland Dairy case that unfolded in a Missouri court in early 2011 said, “This cheese can kill.” (I describe the Morningland case in detail in my book, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights.)
But the reality is that the FDA doesn’t have to take a zero-tolerance approach to the presence of L monocytogenes. That is because L monocytogenes isn’t as threatening in small quantities as other pathogens, like E.coli O157:H7.
The FDA could take the same approach as the European Union or Canada. While the presence of a single cell of L monocytogenes is enough to shutter a facility in the U.S., the European Union and Canada allow small amounts of L monocytogenes (up to 100 cells), based on considerable evidence that small amounts of the pathogen don’t make people sick.
The FDA’s excessively stringent approach has been the subject of debate in the U.S., and a number of scientists have taken the agency to task for its zero-tolerance policy. Back in 2003, four scientists did two studies of L monocytogenes in foods. In one of the studies, “The investigators found L monocytogenes in 1.82% of more than 31,000 food samples analyzed, but only 21 samples contained more than 100 colony-forming units (CFU) per gram (approximately equivalent to 100 organisms per gram),” according to a report. What that says is that of about 600 samples found to contain L monocytogenes, only a little over 3% had the potentially dangerous number of pathogen cells. That also suggests that 97% of the FDA findings of L monocytogenes–often resulting in farm and cheese producer shutdowns based on the zero-tolerance policy–are unwarranted.
The report concluded: “It is clear that the most effective efforts to reduce the risk of listeriosis in RTE (ready-to-eat) foods will involve targeting the food servings that are heavily contaminated, even though the fraction of those servings is very small.” In other words, the zero-tolerance approach, where inspectors seek the fairly common presence of L monocytogenes, may be less safe than searching out the very few high-concentration pockets of listeria.
Why doesn’t the FDA take the same prudent approach to L monocytogenes as the European Union and Canada? You could argue that the FDA just wants to be super prudent. After all, what do the Europeans know about making cheese safely?
Or, you could argue that the FDA doesn’t want to let go of its unrealistic, and itself unsafe, approach to listeria m, because it would lose much of the leverage it has to arbitrarily shut down small artisanal cheese makers. Of course, we all know the FDA would never do something as mean-spirited, arbitrary, and threatening to the public health as mis-using scientific knowledge. No, not our warm and good-hearted professionals at the FDA. But the fact of the matter is that for many years now, the FDA has refused the recommendation of prominent scientists to change its rules on L monocytogenes for ready-to-eat foods like dairy products.
Indeed, the FDA freely admits in its own warnings to cheese makers that L monocytogenes is inherently difficult to completely eliminate. “L monocytogenes is a pathogenic bacterium that is widespread in the environment,” it said in its initial 2012 warning letter to Finger Lakes Farmstead Cheese. The FDA makes that statement in other warnings to cheese makers.
The business about wood boards is just an excuse, a distraction, from the issue at hand, which is the FDA’s determination to harass and even shutter as many artisanal cheese makers as it can.
Bigger picture, the FDA’s rigidity on L monocytogenes is emblematic of our societal problem with bacteria. The FDA’s demand that artisanal cheese producers, which depend on friendly bacteria for the taste and nutritional benefits of their product, essentially create a sterile environment, isn’t unlike what’s happened to the rest of our society with a push for sterilization of food and the environment, all the way to the ever-present hand sanitizers. Unfortunately for small cheese producers, the only entities that can successfully produce cheese in a sterile environment are the corporate producers, whose cheese fewer and fewer people want.
Read the Full Article Here.
The Raw Milk Revolution
Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights
by David E. Gumpert
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