Ending The War on Artisan Cheese Book Review
Editor’s note: We’re very pleased to welcome Gordon Edgar as a contributor. Edgar provides industry insight from the point of view of a cheesemonger, member of the American Cheese Society's Judging Committee, and author of two books on cheese.
Dr. Catherine Donnelly
I first heard Dr. Catherine Donnelly speak almost 20 years ago when attending one of my first American Cheese Society conferences. At that moment, artisan cheese producers and supporters were mobilizing to stop what seemed like a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attempt to eliminate raw milk cheese from the American market. Donnelly spoke compellingly and passionately about the safety of well-produced raw milk cheese from a scientific point of view, speaking as a trained professional who came in uncommitted, studied the data, and came to the conclusion that government officials were suggesting policies that did not follow the facts.
Relatively new to cheese myself at that point, Donnelly’s talk introduced me to some of the political issues in a world I was just getting to know. During that talk, I realized I could not be a competent cheesemonger unless I understood some of the science of cheese and could communicate it to the cheese-interested folks with whom I came into contact. The science of cheese has just proven more important to understand over the years as issues of food safety, recalls, and splashy news articles about the “banning” of favorite cheeses hit social media and public awareness.
Dr. Donnelly has only solidified her position as one of the most important food scientists to the cheese community in recent years. Not only is she an expert on food-borne pathogens, she is a professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont where she also served as co-director of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese. She edited -- and won a James Beard Award for -- the Oxford Companion to Cheese in 2017 and also edited the cheese science geek must-have Cheese and Microbes in 2014.
In her latest book, Ending the War on Artisan Cheese: The Inside Story of Government Overreach and the Struggle to Save Traditional Raw Milk Cheesemakers Donnelly lays out the history of attempts by the FDA since the 1990s to make the importation of raw milk cheese and the production of domestic artisan cheese untenable.
Ending the War on Artisan Cheese covers a lot of ground, but it needs to. Donnelly frequently returns to the common point though: “ Over the past 20 years, the FDA has directly challenged both domestic artisan and imported cheeses. Issues such as the 60-day aging rule, the soft cheese risk assessment, the Listeria swabbing assignment, the use of wooden boards for cheese aging, the use of ash on cheese surfaces, and the establishment of stringent E. coli standards are but a few of the challenges that have arisen aimed at the artisan cheese industry, both domestically and globally. The common denominator between many US Artisan and imported cheeses is that they are produced from raw milk.”
Why is raw milk cheese such a dominant issue? To generalize a little: the argument for prohibition or limitation of raw milk cheese -- a separate issue from raw fluid milk, by the way -- proclaims that this would be done in the name of public health. The backers of safe raw milk cheese production would say raw milk cheese inherently contains flavor attributes and cultural traditions that are unique, community-based, and not replicable by large-scale cheesemakers. While the latter argument is compelling, surely public health would be paramount if both sides were correct, right? Donnelly makes a compelling argument that the science the FDA is using does not support their proposals and that there are links in the timeline between large-scale American dairy organizations losing international trade rulings and FDA movements. In short, evidence points to the war on artisan cheese being influenced not by science, but by the financial motivation of large stakeholders in American agriculture.
One thing that comes through consistently in this book is the unfairness to producers of American artisan cheese to the threat of misunderstood science and rulings stopping their business cold. This is no theoretical exercise either. Let’s not forget that one of the country’s best seasonal cheeses skipped a year of production because the producers were concerned that through no fault of their own, they might have to throw thousands of beautiful cheeses in the compost bin if the FDA was feeling capricious that season. Beyond this real danger to existing businesses, Donnelly writes of another, more far-reaching, effect:
“By targeting artisan cheese, regulatory activity is eliminating the growth of the dairy sector that could do so much to revitalize rural communities, eliminate concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFOs), reduce food waste and our carbon footprint, and produce foods that consumers in our nation of obsessed foodies want to consume, and in the process help small family farms stay in business.”
Ending the War on Artisan Cheese is not always an easy read for the non-scientist but it is a crucial book for those of us who are interested in complex, delicious cheeses and the people who produce them. There are concepts here that are complex if you haven’t encountered them previously: the minutia of the Food Safety Modernization Act, details of listeria studies, Code of Federal Regulations meanings, etc. And some concepts may sound frightening at first, like presence of non-pathogenic E. coli in some raw milk cheeses. This book is a gift to the cheese community, presenting concepts that cheese eaters need to understand if they want to defend the cheese and producers they love.