FDA to Save Us From Scourge of Wood-Aged Artisanal Cheese

The latest foodmakers to face destruction
from the Food and Drug Adminstration’s (FDA) need to regulate all
the things:
artisanal cheesemakers. As part of a new push to enforce
certain aspects of the Food Safety
Modernization Act (FSMA), passed in 2011, the agency
announced that it will no longer allow cheesemakers to use wooden
boards in the aging process. 

“A sense of disbelief and distress is quickly rippling through
the U.S. artisan cheese community,” notes Jeanne
Carpenter at Cheese
Underground, a blog for artisanal cheesemakers. Traditionally,
the FDA has mostly deferred cheese inspections to the states. But
the FDA recently inspected several New York cheesemakers and cited
them for using wooden surfaces to age cheeses. 

The New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets’
Division of Milk Control and Dairy Services, which (like most every
state in the U.S., including Wisconsin), has allowed this practice,
reached out to FDA for clarification on the issue. A response was
provided by Monica Metz, Branch Chief of FDA’s Center for Food
Safety and Applied Nutrition’s (CFSAN) Dairy and Egg Branch.

In the response, Metz stated that the use of wood for cheese
ripening or aging is considered an unsanitary practice by FDA, and
a violation of FDA’s current Current Good Manufacturing Practice
(cGMP) regulations. 

According to Metz, the use of wooden shelves for aging cheese
runs counter to FDA requirements stipulating “all plant equipment
and utensils shall be so designed and of such material and
workmanship as to be adequately cleanable.” In the FDA’s
estimation, there is no possible way that wooden shelves or boards
can be adequately cleaned and sanitized. From Metz:

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.

The fact that wood’s porousness allows it to retain bacteria is
actually one reason why cheesemakers use this method. Contra the
19th century, not all bacteria is bad. Cheese, yogurt, kombucha,
tempeh, and other foods containing live active cultures can
actually be incredibly beneficial for humans’ immune system and
overall health. But what about the bad bacteria—is there any
validity to the FDA’s claim that bad bacteria can’t be properly
purged from wooden boards?

The University
of Tennessee Forest Extension says that while “some have
suggested that it is ‘just common sense’ that a porous material
like wood would be harder to keep clean than plastic,” testing
doesn’t necessarily support this assumption. The Wisconsin
Center for Dairy Research compiled research on
the subject here—there’s been a lot of it from France,
unsurprisingly—and it suggests that proper cleaning and
sanitization methods can sufficiently wipe out bacteria
from various kinds of wooden boards. A 1992 study
showed those using wooden cutting boards at home were less than
half as likely as average to contract salmonellosis, while those
using synthetic (plastic or glass) cutting boards were about twice
as likely to do so. 

Many of the most awarded and well-respected American cheeses are
aged on wooden boards, according to Cheese Underground. “The very
pillar that we built our niche business on is the ability to age
our cheese on wood planks, an art that has been practiced in Europe
for thousands of years,” Wisconsin cheesemaker Chris Roelli—who
developed his cheese recipes specifically to be aged on wooden
boards—told the blog.

Not allowing American cheesemakers to use this practice puts
them “at a global disadvantage because the flavor produced by aging
on wood can not be duplicated. This is a major game changer for the
dairy industry in Wisconsin, and many other states.”

Cheesmakers importing to the United States will be subject to
the same wooden board ban, which in effect means we’ll just miss
out on a lot of cheese imports. The European Union—not generally
known to fuck around on food safety—is totally cool with the use of
wood boards in aging cheese (as is Canada). In fact, certain types
of cheese must be aged on wood in order to get the designation
(Comte, Beaufort, Reblochon). 

Cheesemakers aren’t the only ones to come under increased
scrutiny and needless micromanagement from the FDA as it attempts
to “establish
new prevention-oriented standards” for the “new public health
mandate” the FSMA created. Earlier this year, it suggested that

breweries giving spent grains to local farmers for livestock
feed may have to process and package these grains first—a proposal
that drew a loud and sustained
response from brewers, farmers,
and lawmakers. There’s never been a known contamination problem
with the brewery-to-farm spent grain sharing.

For more on FDA meddling with artisanal cheese makers, see this Reason TV
video from last summer. 

h/t Greg Miller