Setting the Cheez Whiz Standard.

• Position: Call for cheese pasteurization - Brief Article

When French farmer lose Bove drove his tractor into a newly built McDonald's to protest corporate disregard for local and traditional dietary preferences, he hadn't anticipated the most recent challenge to small-scale farmers. While Bove has been sentenced to three months in prison for vandalism, two major food-standard bodies are weighing rules that would put his farm out of business for good by banning cheeses made from unpasteurized milk.

Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Codex Alimentarius (the U.N. and World Trade Organization's standard-setting body) have looked into banning such cheeses based on presumed concerns over food safety, though there is no scientific or health data suggesting cheeses made from unpasteurized milk amount to a public health risk. So far, the Codex has rejected a request from its U.S. members--including the makers of Cheez Whiz and other pasteurized-process cheeses--to allow only pasteurized cheese to be sold. The FDA is still toying with the idea.

Mandatory pasteurization would eliminate the highly distinctive aromas, textures, colors, and flavors that raw milk cheeses afford--all made possible by bacteria which is specific to the breed of cow that produced the milk and the sort of grass the cow munched. This ban would affect such varieties as Swiss Gruyere, French Camembert and Roquefort (the native cheese of Jose Bove's home region), Indian paneer, English farmhouse cheddar, and Italian Gorgonzola and even Parmigiano-Reggiano, among others. Dun Gifford, president of the Boston-based Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust (www.oldwayspt.org) that researches and promotes the value of traditional diets, says that the possible legislation would amount to "an arrow in the...