FDA: “Food Nazis in the Pocket of Big Business”?
Artisan cheese is made by hand in small batches, often using raw milk that is not pasteurized to kill bacteria (raw-milk cheeses must be aged 60 days to make them safer)… Ms. Estrella’s problems began in February, when state tests found listeria in her cheese and throughout the farm building where she makes and ages it…
She says she believes that the F.D.A.’s crackdown is part of a larger campaign against raw milk, and she is fighting for her customers’ right to eat whatever they choose. “I don’t think this issue is about bacteria and it’s not about cheese,” she said. “I think that we’re losing our freedom.”
Full article on how much the government should regulate small farmers.
Federal bureaucrats in the pocket of big business? no kidding?
Beating up on botique cheese producers? That’s where my tax dollars are going?
Tom, surely you don’t want people going around drinking raw milk? Without asking permission?
The dairy product pasturization debate drops IQs even faster than health policy.
For the record, eating unpasteurized dairy products can make people very, very, sick. Bacteria don’t care whether they infect products that are hand made on family farms or produced by agri-business.
Consider Mycobacterium bovis, a germ that causes TB in cattle. You can get it from eating unpasteurized dairy products from cattle that have the disease. It used to be common in the US. Pasteurization and testing herds for TB made it rare in the U.S.
From 2001-2004 there were 35 cases of M. bovis in New York City. These were apparently caused by unpasteurized cheese brought from Mexico to the U.S. From 1994-2005 it was responsible for 45% of the culture positive TB cases in children and 6% of adult cases in Southern California. It is resistant to first line drug treatment. And then there’s hemolytic uremic syndrome, and garden variety salmonella infection.
I’ll take mine pasteurized, but recognize that a lot of people think that the right to eat what one wants is reason enough to get rid of the FDA.