Pure and Simple? Cheese and Ghee
Almost exactly a hundred years, in 1917, in Calcutta in India a controversy flared up about ghee (clarified butter).
There ghee is no ordinary foodstuff. It is a wondrous golden substance, the gift of the holy cow. Made according to centuries of tradition, it is curative, auspicious, and pure.
British chemists, armed with the new analytical techniques that could detect adulteration, upset the apple cart when they declared that most ghee was stretched with vegetable oils or animal fats, and not pure at all.
Weeks of political unrest followed.
So is purity the ritual purity of tradition? Or is it the chemical purity determined by the methods of modern science?
Those days are over, right? Well, I’m not so sure. Presumably kosher and halal foods have to meet both criteria, thus neatly solving the problem.
But consider last week’s mini scandal. An FDA official, Monica Metz, sent a letter to the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets arguing that wooden shelves or boards for curing cheese could not be adequately sanitized. Cheeses cured this way might not be in compliance with safety regulations.
The American Cheese Society fired back saying “For centuries, cheesemakers have been creating delicious, nutritious, unique cheeses aged on wood.”
Tradition. Artisanship. Natural wood. All the sacred cows of the food movement were threatened.
Bob del Grosso, with a lifetime of experience in food including years teaching at the Culinary Institute of America, expressed his exasperation on the Association for Food and Society list on Facebook.
Man, no one seems to want any kind of safety regulations–no matter how sensible–that inconvenience themselves.
It’s fine to call for a ban on GMO’s, trans-fats, second-hand smoke from smokeless cigarettes. But a rule requiring nothing more than replacing or sealing up wooden shelving to make it impermeable to bacterial/fungal/insect infestation?
Oy.
I worked in a raw milk cheese dairy for more than 4 years. We aged all the cheese on wooden shelves and it was a major pain in the neck keeping them sanitary.
After a while they became infected with cheese mites which were very difficult to control.Sorry, I don’t get it.
Linn Steward, a dietician, chimed in.
Since becoming a dietitian and actually studying microbiology, I am more respectful of the dangers. When I lived in France, before I knew any better, I ate everything with gusto including cheeses from god knows whose wooden boards. The trigger for this particular decree was the presence of listeria in multiple inspections in upstate New York.
On her own blog, Food Politics, Marion Nestle commented that “The FDA has some legitimate concerns.”
In short, Bob, Linn, and Marion came down on the side of purity being decided by scientific tests for chemical and microbiological substances. I do too.
The supporters of the artisan cheese makers came down on purity being guaranteed by centuries of tradition, unperturbed by the scientific evidence.
“The pure and simple truth,” said Oscar Wilde, “is rarely pure and never simple.” And much the same could be said of the politics of pure food.
Edit. I am not sure that my point is coming across.
The point is that there are two (at least two) very different ideas about what purity is.
(1) The Food and Drug Administration and most consumers today take pure food to be food that does not contain adulterants and is safe to eat. This purity is assessed with scientific tests.
(2) Through the course of history many people have taken pure food to be food that is prepared according to moral or religious rules. This purity is not assessed with scientific tests.
I think perhaps in the cheese case we have a modern example of this.
______________
Follow up.
For the political fall out of the ghee controversy. Anne Hardcastle, Community and Public Culture: The Marwaris in Calcutta c. 1897 – 1997 Ph. D. Dissertation 2002), chapter 4. You can find this on Google Scholar.
For the cheese.
The FDA quickly backed off. http://www.fda.gov/…/ConstituentUpdates/ucm400808.htm
For Linn Steward’s suggestion for a resolution.
I am okay with exercising discretion when I buy cheese because no way do I want the FDA to make my beloved artisan cheeses like cloth bound cheddar illegal.
For Bob del Grosso’s resolution.
I’m not in support of a ban on using wood shelving. My response was more about the knee-jerk media and producer reaction to the idea. It reminds me a lot of the response to a USDA proposal requiring that all farm animals raised for human consumption be tagged and tracked from cradle to retail shelf.
NAIS (National Animal Identification System) was a proposal that was clearly aimed at protecting consumers of meat produced for mass consumption. It was squashed by farmers/ ranchers who claimed that the added paperwork would ruin them and by a subset of producers who catered to the locavore movement and who added the [justifiable] argument that their customers were already protected by proximity to the source of production.
What should have happened was that producers catering to local markets should have argued for an exemption based solely on the fact that their customers already know who produces the meat they eat. Instead most hopped on the bandwagon with ranchers etc who send animals all over the planet and whose real motive in not wanting consumers to be able to trace contaminated meat back to them has –I suspect–more to do with fear of lawsuits and prosecution than anything else.
But I should know better than to hope for nuanced argument in the public forum where everything is always so black and white. Sigh.
- Indian Cow Slaughter Policies and Food Journeys (Vikram Doctor)
- The Cow’s Nest Cookbook: (1) Super Simple Walnut Ice Cream
What it looked like to a simple guy such as me was that the FDA (as in the case of the spent grain requirement) just wanted to err on the extra-safe side with regards to wood and cheese aging.
My immediate question was: “Has there been a problem of people getting sick from cheese aged on wooden shelves?” Going back to the brewer’s spent grain example, there had not been a problem–the FDA thought there could be a problem (or, in my cynical mode, feed producers complained about brewers pulling one over on the FDA). If there is a problem with people routinely getting sick then there may be need for some tweaking of the regulation.
As Reason’s Ronald Bailey points out, our food is safer than ever” “In 1900, six years before Upton Sinclair wrote his great muckraking book, The Jungle, about the filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry, the death rate from gastritis, duodentitis, enteritis, and colitis was 142.7 people per 100,000. It is likely that most people experienced bouts of intestinal distress several times a year. Today, accepting CDC calculations of 5000 deaths per year implies a hundred-fold reduction, to just 1.4 deaths per 100,000 people.”
Yes, each and every one of the 5000 deaths per year is a tragedy but perhaps lowering the number of vehicle accidents might be a better place to focus our pocketbooks.
Norm, no disagreement here. I could not agree more that we have the safest food in world history. I could not agree more that the FDA may overstep (whether to protect the public or enlarge their mandate or both. I have no evidence to decide this.).
The point I wanted to make is that simply asserting tradition to brush aside potentially dangerous practices is dangerous. There’s a reason why foods are safer today than in the past. And that’s because businesses have learned to apply the lessons of science about food safety.
Rachel, we’re in agreement.
My idea was if the tradition has had no (or perhaps “few” would be more correct) problems then I the the FDA went looking in the wrong place. If, on the other hand, the tradition has been one beset by problems (I’m thinking raw milk here) then the practice needs to be scrutinized and corrected.
There seems to be on the part of regulators to want to control process rather than the outcome. Having been in a government organization that regulated forest practices, I got frustrated by that narrow mindset. We stifled innovative ways of accomplishing our goals by focusing on process rather than product.
Hi Norm, I’d love to hear more about the process/product tension in the forestry case. Perhaps one day we shall be able to meet and have this chat.
The point I want to make here is that although some people are pointing to tradition to say that there is a long safety record, I think others have something different in mind: namely, that tradition itself conveys value, tradition creates the kind of foods we want. That0s why I wanted to draw the religious parallel to groups that believe certain foods are good to eat because they have been prepared according to religious rules.
I’m not a fan of any religious strictures on what I eat or how my food gets prepared. But before germ theory and science, my guess (on kosher eating) is that taboos grew up around foods that were problems–perhaps someone ate shellfish at the wrong time or place and so shellfish became a non-kosher food. Likewise, certain food prepared in a certain way did not make people ill.
I suspect if my ghee were not prepared according to religious stricture and I adhered to such things, then I might be rather upset. I think I’d have been upset if I’d learned my ghee was adulterated to make it more profit.
Hi Norm,lots of people share your theory of the origin of taboos, most prominently the anthropologist Marvin Harris. I have to admit that I’m in the other camp, seeing the origin of taboos in the need of distinct groups to mark themselves off one from another. Its most prominent adherents are Jean Soler, another anthropologist by the name of Mary Douglas, and Frederick Simmoons who assembled masses of data on taboos. Quite fascinating.
Regarding a comment posted above on the origins of taboos. “… the origin of taboos is the need of distinct groups to mark themselves off one from another …” That is really interesting and would explain why modern advertising / branding as they call it has such a powerful impact. For better or worse I am immune, so I am always looking to others to help me understand. Thank you again Rachel.
Yes, Linn, we have so many food options that we can mark ourselves off into smaller and smaller groups.
When I was in culinary school and first working in kitchens, ThoseOnHigh ordained that fine, old wooden cutting boards be banished because they couldn’t be sanitized. We had to use those thin plastic ones that were lighter, softer, and nicked more easily, but, by God, they could be soaked in a strong bleach solution, and thereby restored to their pristine whiteness, surely proof of being made pure and safe.
Well, it turned out a couple of years down the line, some research revealed that the softness of these plastic boards led to knife cuts that could not reliably be reached by the bleach – cuts that became tiny petri dishes of nastiness to infect our knives, cross-contaminate the foods we processed on them between washings and bleach-spraying the boards, and to potentially make their way into the dining room, on a plate of food … you can figure the rest.
Research also revealed that there are enzymes in wood that remain after that wood is taken from the tree, that are naturally toxic to bacteria. A proper wooden cutting board, butcher’s block, or cross-cut tree stump seen in kitchens across Asia and in taquerîas, fondas, markets, and street stands all over México, which have been in use for centuries without killing off the populations of the countries where they are used.
And, contrary to all public safety logic, the wooden boards were not readmitted in all kitchens after this finding. Of course, the plastic boards are cheaper by far than the really good, heavy wooden ones, and they they are much lower maintenance since they can be tossed into a sink-full of bleach. Of course, the issue of the damage caused by all of that bleach going down the drain is overlooked.
Now when I hear the phrase “public safety” invoked in a food context, the first thing I look for is, sadly, not the bug or microbe, or pair of dirty hands, but the dirty food coming in the back door from the suppliers, and who the lobbying group is behind the government’s sudden interest in public health and safety. This list is long; cutting boards, cheese-making, home prep kitchens, and even food trucks and carts have all been subjected to wholesale cheeseboarding – shut down, disallowed, banned at one time or another on the charge of their “threat to public health and safety.” In the latter case, it is usually the fixed, brick-and-mortar restauranteurs who pushed the matter.
Hi Sharon, first thanks for the reprise of the cutting board issue. I remember how happy I was not to have to throw out my old wooden cutting boards
You raise a whole host of valid problems. As someone with vaguely libertarian instincts I am treat public health and safety regulation as a very tricky matter, necessary in some cases, beneficial to the larger society, but always to be scrutinized with care.
As I said to Norm, though, the point I am raising here is that sometimes two completely different notions of purity come into conflict. I think that is part of what is going on here.
Yes people have gotten sick even died from listeriosis from cheese Norm. Spent the last hour reading over some of the really excellent data out there on the matter. Not very often and not correlated directly with wooden boards, but it happens.
And you are so right Rachel as you usually are that tradition is no guarantee of safety. Wooden boards are one potential problem and there are protocols for using them safely. A separate but potentially more dangerous issue is raw milk. In the firestorm that followed the FDA offensive and retreat, I think the two threads got mangled. My cherished cloth bound cheddar is made from pasteurized milk and aged on wooden boards.
My problem is I am not sure one size law fits every cheese eaters situation. So I would be okay with a warning on soft ripened fresh cheese that immune compromised people should exercise caution. Being a libertarian at heart, my preferred approach is less regulation and more education.
Thank you Rachel for putting the firestorm into such a readable and relevant historic context. And thank for acknowledging my little contribution.
And thank you, Linn, for further details on listeria, wooden boards, etc. And I share your enthusiasm for good cheddar. It would be the last food I would want to give up, the food I would chose on my deathbed. And obviously fresh cheeses pose much greater risks than aged ones.
The point I wanted to make here was that I don’t think the entire discussion was about safety from illness or about problems detectable by modern science. I think part of it had to do with a quite other notion of purity, one more akin to that of those religions that divide foods into acceptable and not acceptable, pure and not pure, according to religious rules. Don’t know if this makes any sense.
Rachel, I share your concern on “purity” being the focus. The U.S. government swung this door open and severely damaged the hinges when it started labeling organic food. There are other things as well: country of origin comes to mind and perhaps nutrition information. And now, GMO labeling in some states.
The USDA certified organic was never meant to be a signifier of health, lack of pesticides, or purity. It has come to mean all of that, and more, to many believers.
Yes, indeed it has Norm. So many descriptions of food–organic, local, natural–are in fact shorthand for a whole slew of moral/political/health attitudes.
Rachel, I suspect you have seen Baylen Linnekin’s blast at Reason.com:
“The FDA’s Unpalatable Cheese Crackdown. Did the FDA really back down? There are holes in that argument.” (http://reason.com/archives/2014/06/14/the-fdas-unpalatable-cheese-crackdown/singlepage)
No, I’d missed Baylen’s column. Thanks for pointing it out to me, Norm.
I have been struggling now for a couple days to get my head around the distinction you were making re: cheese and might have come up with something intelligent to say.
Toward the end of your original post “The point is that there are two (at least two) very different ideas about what purity is.”
Maybe I would posit a third. Let me explain; be patient for this anecdote. Last summer shopping my greenmarket preferred vegetable grower the issue of organic came up. These farmers do not certify organic because they don’t want to be bothered with paperwork and inspections. No problem here from me. It’s fresh and local and to the extent I trust any seller I trust their good judgement. A young intense well off woman came to the stand and started to grill my farmers. She knew she wanted organic and refused to accept any reinsurance from them. I know some people’s head is cast in concrete, but this exchange really mothered me because this young obviously educated person let the word trump what I would call common sense. For me that is ideology or some form of propaganda.
And for me an ideology is different from a tradition like Kosher or a tradition of cheese making culling several hundred years of trial and error to determine whether a process is safe or toxic.
So I guess I am looking for at least one more category to file purity under because I am okay with both science and tradition, but ideology really scares me.
Linn,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. What struck me (and I may be wrong about this) is that many of the people protesting the FDA statement did not seem to care about safety. Their response seemed to be “tradition is good, changing that tradition is bad.” That is, very much what you are calling ideology.
On another front, I’m not sure that a long tradition of preparing food a certain way makes it safe by OUR standards. We expect our food to be extraordinarily safe, so safe that we eat lots of things like milk, fruits, and vegetables that used to be avoided as dangerous. As you know, even now determining the extent of food borne illness is tricky. In the past it was much, much more so and I suspect it was much more prevalent.
And of course traditions like kosher or halal are not about safety.
Does all this make any sense?
Yes. Makes good sense. Good observation too for which I thank you. I never thought about it quite that way, but many of those folks who opt for tradition probably do have a fair amount of disdain for food safety. Perhaps because they never lived a place where food could be really unsafe. Been my pleasure to have this little exchange with you. Best of all I learned something.
Well, thank you for taking the time to comment. I’ve enjoyed looking at your blog.
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