Ending the War on Artisan Cheese: The Inside Story of Government Overreach and the Struggle to Save Traditional Raw Milk Cheesemakers Contributor(s): Donnelly, Catherine (Author)

A prominent food scientist defends the use of raw milk in traditional artisan cheesemaking.

Raw milk cheese--cheese made from unpasteurized milk--is an expansive category that includes some of Europe's most beloved traditional styles: Parmigiano Reggiano, Gruyère, and Comté, to name a few. In the United States, raw milk cheese forms the backbone of the resurgent artisan cheese industry, as consumers demand local, traditionally produced, and high-quality foods. Internationally award-winning artisan cheeses like Bayley Hazen Blue (Jasper Hill, VT) would have been unimaginable just forty years ago when American cheese meant Kraft Singles.

Unfortunately the artisan cheese industry faces an existential regulatory threat. Over the past thirty years the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has edged toward an outright ban on raw milk cheeses. Their assault on traditional cheesemaking goes beyond a debate about raw milk safety; the FDA has also attempted to ban the use of wooden boards, the use of ash in cheese ripening, and has set stringent microbiological criteria that many artisan cheeses cannot meet. The David versus Goliath existence of small producers fighting crushing regulations is true in parts of Europe as well, where beloved creameries are going belly-up or being bought out because they can't comply with EU health ordinances. Centuries-old cheese styles like Fourme d'Ambert and Cantal are nearing extinction, leading Prince Charles to decry the "bacteriological correctness" of European regulators.

The dirty secret is that Listeria and other bacterial outbreaks occur in pasteurized cheeses more often than in raw milk cheeses, and traditional processes like ash-ripening have been proven safe. In Ending the War on Artisan Cheese, Dr. Catherine Donnelly forcefully defends traditional cheesemaking, while exposing government actions in the United States and abroad designed to take away food choice under the false guise of food safety. This book is fundamentally about where and how our food is produced, the values we place on methods of food production, and how the roles of tradition, heritage, and quality often conflict with advertising, politics, and profits in influencing our food choices.

Dr. Catherine Donnelly is a professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont and an expert on Listeria and other foodborne pathogens. In 2017 Dr. Donnelly won the James Beard Award for Reference and Scholarship for her work as the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Cheese, the most comprehensive cheese encyclopedia ever published. Dr. Donnelly is also the editor of the book Cheese and Microbes.

"Dr. Donnelly does the hard work of piecing together a definitive account of how our government has threatened artisanal cheese producers at home and abroad. I had previously read the published science and couldn't understand why the FDA would use it against US producers. This book aims to clarify their intentions. Consumers and elected officials now have a responsibility to take action to stop this overreach."--Carlos Yescas, director, Oldways Cheese Coalition

"One size does not fit all when it comes to food safety regulation. In this comprehensive, critical review of FDA policy and practice over the last three decades in regulating commercial cheesemaking, microbiologist Catherine Donnelly reveals how the twentieth-century industrial ethos that guides regulatory rule-making is dangerously out of step not only with the growing interest in producing and consuming artisanal foods, but also with the latest scientific evidence."--Heather Paxson, author of The Life of Cheese