The Essential Book of Fermentation (19 page)

The audience for fine cheese continues to grow. Artisanal, a restaurant in New York City, served, at last count, 188 different cheeses, has an entire cheese room, not just a cheese cart, and employs a full-time “cave master,” as its master of cheese is called. The descriptions of the cheeses range from “aromatic” to “challenging” to “assertive, bordering on mean.” It may be suddenly chic to order the moldiest, most offensive cheese on the list, but fads pass. What lasts is quality, and with cheese, many of the best were here long before our generation came along and will be here long after we’re gone. It’s timeless quality that we’re focusing on, and quality starts with healthy pastures that produce healthy animals that give pure, flavorful, healthy milk that is colonized by friendly bacteria and molds that make extraordinarily delicious cheese.

The rBGH Problem

One of the chief concerns that organically minded consumers have about milk and dairy products like cheese is that much, if not most, of the cow’s milk in the United States is from cows treated with genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH), also known as bovine somatotropin (rBST), to stimulate their milk production. Today’s dairy cows injected with rBGH produce 2.5 times more milk than the cows of the 1950s—10 to 20 times the amount of milk needed to suckle a calf, putting added stress on the cow, shortening its life span, and increasing the incidence of mastitis, an infection of the udder that is then treated with antibiotics. The Animal Protection Institute states that 17 million shots of antibiotics are given to cattle every year for infections related to milk production and other diseases. Antibiotics can transfer to a cow’s milk, and many scientists and medical professionals have been warning for years that as humans are exposed to a plenitude of antibiotics, new and antibiotic-resistant strains of disease organisms are formed and will continue to form. To say nothing about the deleterious effects on our intestinal flora from continued low doses of antibiotics.

Another danger to people drinking milk from rBGH-treated cows is that these hormones can get into the milk and create adverse effects in humans who consume them. In a recent letter to Kraft Foods/Philip Morris, the Sierra Club asked Betsy Holden, CEO of Kraft Foods, to stop the use of rBGH in all Kraft’s dairy products. The letter states that “there is evidence that this genetically engineered hormone, given to increase milk production, also increases the production of IGF-1 in the milk, which has been shown to promote breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers.” For this reason, wise buyers look for cheese that’s either organic (rBGH is not allowed under USDA organic rules) or from dairies that certify they do not use this growth hormone. Many producers are proud of the fact that their milk is rBGH-free, and they advertise the fact. Sheep’s milk and goat’s milk are always free of the hormone, since it cannot be used on these animals, and Monsanto, the company that engineered rBGH, has not developed milk-stimulating hormones for them. Although Monsanto had enough clout to get rBGH’s use permitted in the United States, it is not allowed in Canada, France, Italy, Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Greece, New Zealand, or Australia. It seems that while our neighbor to the north and partners in Europe and the antipodes are continuing to make cheese without the need to stimulate milk production by using dangerous hormones that may harm both the bovine and human populations, the United States continues to capitulate to agribusiness and its focus on profits before people. It doesn’t have to be that way. Kraft makes cheese in Italy without the hormone because its use is banned there, so the company can’t argue that it can’t be done. It can only argue that rBGH makes factory cheese more profitable.

And that argument about profitability may not hold water for long. According to the polling and metrics service SPINS/ACNielsen, the organic dairy industry has experienced tremendous growth in almost every category it tracks. “I think these days American consumers understand the difference between organic and conventional milk,” says Deirdre Fitzgerald, marketing manager for Stonyfield Farm, based in Londonderry, New Hampshire. “Consumers concerned with how the cows are treated and where their milk is coming from choose organic.”

While big agribusinesses are driving small conventional family dairy farmers out of business (
Rural Cooperatives
estimates that the number of dairy farms in Wisconsin alone has decreased by 39 percent since 1989), organic dairying is one bright spot in family farming. Coulee Region Organic Produce Pool (CROPP), a Wisconsin cooperative made up of family farmers, has seen its membership increase from seven dairy farmers in 1988 to 1,600 from thirty-four states and Canada today. In California, shelves of large supermarket chains like Safeway, Ralphs, and Raley’s routinely stock organic milk from producers like Alta Dena, Clover, and the Straus Family Creamery in Marshall, California. Besides making their own cheeses, Straus sells to local cheesemakers like the Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, not far from Marshall. Cowgirl exclusively uses Straus organic milk and makes a variety of cheeses worth seeking out. Among them is quark—a tart, fresh, fermented cheese that will be known to those who’ve visited Denmark and Germany, where it’s a favorite slathered on rich whole grain toast for breakfast or spooned over fresh fruit as you would yogurt. The company also makes crème fraîche, another fermented fresh cheese with the consistency of a loose yogurt, with a full buttery flavor and a sweet almond character. Crème fraîche is one of the secrets French cooks have for improving a wide variety of dishes by making them smooth, creamy, and fresh tasting. Cowgirl also makes Red Hawk, a sumptuous cheese defined by wild bacteria native to Point Reyes; in fact, the cheese couldn’t be made anywhere else. It’s aged four weeks and washed with a brine solution that tints the rind a sunset red-orange. Cowgirl also uses Straus organic milk to make Mount Tam, an aged, white mold-ripened, firm-textured, triple cream cheese for snacking or for the after-dinner cheese board. The Mount Tam slowly unfolds layer after layer of rich tangy flavor as it melts in the mouth, and is one of America’s great artisanal cheeses. A third cheese, Chimney Rock, is mild and dipped in a sugary after-dinner wine, then dusted with ground mushrooms. It’s named for a geological feature on the coast of the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Careful organic dairy farms like Straus take the preventive approach to disease control, building the health of the soil, and thus the health of the herd. “Our milking cows are not allowed to get antibiotics,” says Vivien Straus, the creamery’s marketing director. “In our case, we use homeopathic remedies.”

Many organic dairies also don’t homogenize their milk; that is, put it through a high-speed filter with tiny holes that break up the fat globules and disperse them through the milk so the cream doesn’t float to the top. Years ago, most whole milk came in glass quart bottles that often had a bulbous top where the cream would rise and collect. Homogenization became standard practice in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And yet there is some question about homogenization and its health effects. In their
Extension Goat Handbook,
Fact Sheet E-1, G. F. W. Haenlein and R. Caccese of the University of Delaware state, “It appears that when fat globules are forcibly broken up by mechanical means, it allows an enzyme associated with milk fat, known as xanthine oxidase, to become free and penetrate the intestinal wall.” Once xanthine oxidase gets through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream, it may scar the heart and arteries, which in turn may stimulate the body to release cholesterol into the blood in an attempt to lay a protective fatty material on the scarred areas. This can lead to arteriosclerosis, they suggest.

This potential effect is not a problem with unhomogenized cow’s milk. In unhomogenized milk, this enzyme is normally excreted from the body without much absorption. In a further e-mail exchange, Dr. Haenlein told me that “unpasteurized (raw) milk usually is not homogenized.” He added that the final word is not yet in on the role of xanthine oxidase in cardiovascular disease. Whatever problems that may result will be avoided if your cheese is made from raw or unhomogenized organic milk.

The Raw Milk Debate

Just as a conventional farmer protects his crops by killing bugs with pesticides, killing the weeds with herbicides, and killing the soil microorganisms with fungicides, so also many people believe that sterilizing food will ward off disease. But we’ve learned from the farm model that far from warding off disease, sterilization eliminates the diverse ecologies that nature establishes to counteract disease organisms, and that contact with all kinds of microbes is necessary for the development of a healthy human immune system.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about prohibiting the sale of raw milk for making cheeses, both those produced domestically and those produced abroad. But almost all the world’s great cheeses are made with raw milk, and until the late 1940s, almost all American cheese was made with it. Disease outbreaks were very rare because the lactic acid in the cheese produced by the starter cultures of lactobacilli microorganisms and the salt used to flavor and preserve cheese prevent harmful bacteria from growing. In 1949, a law was passed requiring that raw milk cheeses be aged for sixty days at 35ºC (95ºF)—enough time to kill off any harmful bacteria such as
E. coli
, salmonella, and listeria. This law was later extended to foreign-made cheeses, and over time, many states passed laws requiring pasteurization for cheeses aged less than sixty days. Still, the law didn’t prohibit raw milk cheeses, and as the interest in good raw milk cheese both domestic and foreign burgeoned in the late 1990s, the agribusiness cheese industry began to take notice. In 1998, an industrial cheese trade group proposed that all cheeses made or sold in the United States should be made with pasteurized milk. The next year, the FDA informed the American Cheese Society, a group that represents artisanal cheesemakers, that it was investigating the survival of pathogens past the sixty-day waiting period, and that this investigation could lead to a requirement for pasteurization for all cheese. What a boon for huge corporate cheese factories if not only the artisan cheesemakers of America could be denied their superior raw material, but also pesky competitors like Parmigiano-Reggiano, Gruyère, Brie de Meaux, farmhouse cheddar from England, Roquefort, and additional scores of the world’s greatest cheeses could be prevented from being sold in America. Those Europeans who weren’t snickering at our naivete were horrified. They viewed any potential ban of raw milk cheese as both a witch hunt against microorganisms and a denial of their cultural heritage.

There was such an uproar that the FDA backed off its “ban raw milk” stance.

The fact is that raw milk cheese is simply better-tasting than pasteurized milk cheese—and safer. To quote one French study, in the
Journal of Dairy Science,
“Raw milk cheeses had a more intense flavor than the pasteurized milk cheeses. This difference was supported by the [chemical analysis] profiles of volatile [flavor] compounds. These differences were related to the high level of indigenous microflora in raw milk cheeses.”

Pasteurization destroys the almost infinite possibilities for flavor and texture variations in cheese as produced by our friendly microbes. As with wine and bread, quality results from good, organic, raw materials and the proper manipulation of bacteria and yeast. Americans traditionally have felt safe with the sterilization approach, but due in no small measure to the organic community and its understanding of the beneficial role of microorganisms in health, the value of raw milk in the creation of world-class cheese has been recognized. The American Cheese Society and the Oldways Preservation Trust, a Boston-based nonprofit organization devoted to sustainable agriculture and traditional foods, joined forces to create the Cheese of Choice Coalition (CCC) to fight any laws banning raw milk cheeses. Speaking about the possibility of a ban, “We could become nothing more than a Velveeta nation,” complained K. Dun Gifford, president of Oldways.

Slow Food, an Italy-based organization devoted to natural foods prepared by hand, has issued a “Manifesto in Defense of Raw-Milk Cheese.” It says in part, “The bacterial health of our unpasteurized dairy products is destroyed by overzealous sterilization procedures. So will the health of human beings be destroyed through a diet of sterile food. Without any challenge, our immune system will fail and our medications become ineffective. Moreover, the unique flavor and aroma of cheese are conserved by non-pasteurization.”

CCC has argued that some of the most often-quoted examples of disease outbreaks tied to cheese have been traced to fresh Mexican-style cheeses made in home kitchens, sometimes with pasteurized milk. Most of the recorded outbreaks of cheese-borne disease have been traced to pasteurized cheeses or resulted from improper production and unclean facilities. The CCC warns that pasteurized milk can be more vulnerable to pathogens than raw milk. The organic-minded can see why: The milk is deprived of its natural, healthy mix of microorganisms that produce both lactic acid and bacteriocins.

Part of the problem is the trend toward globalization and the worldwide standardization of food rules, which have the effect of eliminating the local, unique, and handmade in favor of the standard, factory-made processed foods sold by international food conglomerates like Kraft Foods/Philip Morris. This trend is characterized by the conglomerates as a way to protect human health, when in fact there’s evidence that it may actually threaten human health. But what about legitimate health concerns regarding raw milk? Is there no danger at all?

Improper handling and unclean conditions are always a danger, whether in the small fromagerie or in the large factory, and no matter what type of milk is used. And in fact the danger may be greater in large cheese factories that import milk from many dairies over which they have little quality control. However, the International Dairy Foods Association has promulgated a system called HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points); by keeping records and implementing HACCP properly, any dairy and cheesemaking operation can be kept clean and wholesome. It is the implementation of HACCP that the FDA should have been encouraging, not the prohibition of raw milk cheese.