Comments on: Food safety bill: goodbye, artisanal cheese?

By: DensityDuck

DensityDuck — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:16:21 +0000

Ha. The handmade-toy and -children’s product industry has been dealing with this for a long time now (see the CPSIA).

By: Name: Mark

Name: Mark — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:36:20 +0000

The problem I have with the FDA is that its one big organization that’s in charge of regulating a hell of a lot of things, which is bad for them and bad for the people its built to protect; higher potential for foul-ups, in my opinion.
In Canada (I’m doing this research on-the-fly, so bear with me) we have separate departments for everything, it seems. Food is regulated by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, drugs and dangerous product recalls by Health Canada, etc.

By: John Burgess

John Burgess — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 19:31:48 +0000

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I do think there are some real public health issues when it comes to raw milk and its products. It’s one thing to eschew BHT and some antibiotics in your milk production. But avoiding vaccinating a herd against a variety of lethal-to-humans diseases is a different matter. We’re already looking at antibiotic-immune strains of TB, so do we need to spread them just a little faster? How about Brucellosis? Nature’s own abortificant!

I’d prefer to know that consuming a dairy product did not carry with it the same level of risk as eating fugu. If I want the fugu-level risk, I know where to find it. Or, I can find my own risky-though-natural foodstuffs. I don’t see a need to have them on a grocery shelf.

Guarantee that the herds are vaccinated, and I don’t care whether the dairy product is from raw or Pasteurized milk.

By: rxc

rxc — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:34:54 +0000

Here in France, the artisanale cheese is everywhere, with at least 5 producers in my weekly market. Right next to the lady who sells “lait cru” (raw milk) at a price that is less than what the supermarkets charge for pasteurized milk – they say the big producers only pay them 0.30 euros/l, while the supermarkets charge 1.10/liter. She charges 1.00 for lait cru, which tastes much better than UHT. And then there are the producers of baked goods (not made in a sterile commercial kitchen), home-packed jams, sausages and meat, and LOTS of fruits and veggies that do not have any quality control programs attached to them.

Although I am here in France for food like this, I saw an article in the NYT last week about an artisanale producer in the US who had been inspected, and they found listeria in her cremerie, and wanted her to recall all her cheese. She has refused, and now the entire weight of the US regulatory apparatus is about to descend on her. Having worked for a (different) US regulatory agency in my past, I feel for her.

But then this is all caused when we get all sorts of hand-wringing and wailing and calls for more laws “to make sure these things never happen again” whenever an outbreak of food poisoning breaks out, and there are all sorts of organizations that seem to be determined to force us to eat only boiled gruel, because it is safe, and good for us, and good for the planet. I think these same organzations also support locally produced food, and small family farms, and the sort of producer like the lady above, who cannot afford to pay for QA departments, and accountants, and IT systems to track each individual drop of milk or lump of cheese. I don’t know how they expect to be able to feed us all. But since they are all good green folks, maybe they figure that they will make food so expensive that more people will starve, and the planet’s population will drop. Or at least we will all get skinny again, just like we were back during the depression.

No one has figured out how to deal with the risk that is attendant to living a normal life, without the politicians mis-using it to their advantage. I think I will stay here in France for a while – the EUcrats in Brussels who come up with our food safety regulations here are not quite as crazy as US congresspersons – yet.