America’s artisan cheesemakers have fought several David-versus-Goliath battles with the FDA in recent years. The agency has threatened to ban aging on wooden shelves, to outlaw ash in cheese (that pretty gray ripple in Humboldt Fog) and to implement unattainable standards for raw-milk cheese. The FDA is supposed to protect public health, but there’s little science to support these proposals.
Catherine Donnelly (above), a professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont, believes the agency has another agenda and makes a compelling case in her new book, Ending the War on Artisan Cheese (Chelsea Green Publishing). I have edited our conversation for brevity and clarity.
The book surprised me because I think of you as a measured and cautious person, a sober academic, not a bomb thrower. But from the title page, you come out punching. What got you up in arms? Was it a single incident or a slow drip of evidence that made you think this was, as you say, a war?
It was kind of a slow drip over a long period. I am a pretty measured and patient and respectful person, but when you see science being so inaccurately interpreted, you have to wonder what’s going on. I think it was the wooden boards that sent me over the top because there was not a bit of scientific evidence that what the FDA was proposing would have made anything safer. They were just arbitrarily advising cheesemakers to use plastic or stainless-steel shelving, which would have made things worse. This isn’t science, so there has to be another agenda.
You wrote of your initial reluctance to get drawn into the raw-milk cheese debate. Why were you so hesitant?
As academics, we use our voice through our publications. Our job is to put unbiased, credible, scientific information into a public forum and then let policy arise from that credible science. I realized all the credible science we could be generating left me voiceless in what was going on.
You argue that the FDA persists in chasing the wrong targets: aging on wooden boards, the use of ash in cheese, the permitted levels of non-toxigenic E.coli. So how do these targets end up on their radar?
Former FDA target: Ashed cheeses
I just ask the questions. I would love to see an investigate journalist look at where this came from. But the questions I ask illustrate the public concern about who has a seat at the table when rule making is done. The large industrial giants with their lobbying power seem to drown out small producers and consumers who don’t want a monolithic food supply. Consumers want choice.
As we’ve seen from the Airbus-Boeing issue, the agenda all along was to put up barriers to AOP and PDO cheeses from Europe. So I think there was an effort to establish criteria that those cheeses couldn’t meet. I’m not the only scientist who has raised these alarms.
You clearly think the USDA would do a better job regulating artisan cheese than the FDA.
Our agricultural research portfolio resides at USDA. These people understand how food is produced. Some of the regulations coming out of the FDA give us pause. Do people writing the rules really understand how food is produced? Are we going to end up with one industrial model of cheese production?
USDA takes care of all sorts of issues in rural America. Right now, agriculture is being killed in this country. It is not dying on its own. We need to pay attention to what’s going on in rural America, and the USDA has many solutions. Dairy is in crisis, and if cheesemaking is taking off in rural America and returning people to the farm, isn’t that a goal we would want?
You present many examples of FDA taking actions, or threatening actions, that aren’t based on science. Do you believe the regulators are simply incompetent and lacking in knowledge, or are they compromised in some way?
The agency admits that their inspectors aren’t trained. Here in Vermont, a lot of the inspectors for artisan cheese facilities were seafood inspectors. They had no idea what they were looking for. The scary part is, with FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act), we now have the authority to go into foreign food-processing establishments and conduct inspections there. The French spend millions to education and train their cheesemakers. Are we really going to send seafood inspectors?
I’d like to share a key quote from the book that may be hard to understand for people who don’t follow these issues: “The FDA’s regulatory activities toward cheesemakers mirror the trade disputes occurring at the WTO, mostly around the protection of common cheese names.” Can you clarify this for Planet Cheese readers?
As a scientist, when issues defy scientific explanation, I always ask myself what else could be going on. It was interesting to me that a series of regulatory pronouncements from the FDA almost mirrored what was happening with trade. If we want to keep name-protected cheeses [such as Comté and Roquefort] out of commerce, writing stringent E. coli regulations is one way to do that. My question has always been, “Did our artisans just get caught in the crossfire or was the intention to shut them down as well?”
You chide the FDA for not basing its regulatory actions on science. Yet you also write, “Perhaps it is time for voices beyond science to impact our food choices.”
The only information that can be considered in FDA debates about food is peer-reviewed published scientific information. If you look at how foods are regulated in Europe, there are many other considerations, socioeconomic considerations, that don’t get voiced in our debates. When Vacherin Mont d’Or had a Listeria outbreak, instead of shutting down that whole operation, the Swiss said, “We’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to save this magnificent cheese.” They have funded research institutions that solve problems for cheesemakers, that invest in technical training. That makes for a safer food supply.