Following the release of a surprise statement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expressing respect for the artisan cheesemaking community and announcing that FDA is “pausing its testing program for non-toxigenic E. coli in cheese,” FDA Deputy Director for Foods and Veterinary Medicine, Michael Taylor, met with raw milk cheese producers on February 12 to learn more about the concerns of the American artisan cheese industry.
This Listening Session was held at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, where Taylor was joined by Dr. Susan Mayne, Director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and a number of pertinent FDA staff. In opening remarks, American Cheese Society (ACS) Executive Director, Nora Weiser, expressed that “ACS’s desire to preserve and protect traditional cheesemaking practices; ensure safe, diverse products for consumers; and work with regulators to avoid undue and unnecessary barriers to growth are shared by many allied industry groups.” Weiser went on to name over 20 industry groups that support ACS in this direction, including numerous regional cheese guilds, international cheese organizations, and other dairy industry groups.
Seven ACS members, all raw milk cheesemakers from around the country, lent their voices to advance the dialogue and understanding that are needed to ensure continued growth of the artisan cheese sector. Presenting cheesemakers focused on several key issues:
The church has order cheap viagra grown significantly and still has a community spirit. Another benefit of online purchasing tadalafil 10mg uk is concerned with its different dosages. It order viagra This learningworksca.org might come at lesser cost value but it serves the same purpose as its brand drug. But the reality is completely different than what they think. learningworksca.org ordering viagra from india
Taylor emphasized that “we have to work together, and ACS is positioned for leadership in helping FDA understand what works for your product.” He went on to explain that preventive controls (PC) are about industry knowing what is needed and assessing what history has shown is successful. In response to ongoing concerns over changes to the 60-day aging rule, Taylor assured the group that any change to the rule will not be a surprise to stakeholders, and that this open dialogue is a prelude to any future rule-making or comment process. He stated that we must “look at raw milk cheese in [the] context of the PC framework.”
Mayne agreed, stressing the importance of science. She pledged that FDA will seek outside consult from academia and science in approaching artisan cheese safety. She sees moving forward in three steps: dialogue, which was furthered at the Listening Session; data, which must be shared openly; and scientific engagement, with technical discussions informed by what cheesemakers are doing.
Spurred by Taylor and Mayne, those present agreed that the next step is to pull together a group of relevant stakeholders, technical experts, and appropriate FDA staff to convene and discuss what preventive controls might look like for raw milk cheesemaking, and how testing can play its appropriate role in verifying controls. Jeremy Stephenson, cheesemaker at Spring Brook Farm in Vermont and member of the ACS Board of Directors, captured the theme of the meeting when he stated, “Concrete, measurable steps need to be taken on the part of FDA at every level to give the cheesemaking community confidence that regulators are operating in the spirit of FSMA. We need and value good regulation both to protect our customers as well as our collective industry.”
By Lorrie Baumann
As the market for quality cheeses grows, cheesemakers like Marieke Penterman of Marieke Gouda depend on professional cheesemongers to continue educating their customers about the products in their cases. That’s particularly important if, as some cheesemakers say, the cheese market is not driven so much by a definition of “local” that depends solely on geography as it is by a definition of “local” that connotes a community of like-minded people who share a cultural context. It’s cheesemongers who tell the stories that communicate that cultural context to their customers, Penterman observes. “It’s fun to see the cheesemonger community grow and develop a passion for the cheeses. It’s a kind of community,” she says. “Those people are so essential to the food industry. They represent us in the stores, and they talk about us, and they pass on that passion for cheese. It’s just phenomenal.”
Penterman herself experiences that sense of community among those who appreciate fine cheeses, she says. “When you go to a food show, it’s always fun to see people enjoy it, and it’s so rewarding and encouraging in what you’re doing.”
The awards that Penterman has won at many of those food shows are permanent symbols of how much her cheeses are enjoyed. Since she started making cheese in 2006, Penterman’s company, Holland’s Family Cheese, has won more than 100 national and international awards, including awards for all of its Marieke Gouda varieties. She has recently added Marieke Gouda Honey Clover, Marieke Gouda Cranberry (seasonal) and Marieke Gouda Jalapeno to her line. Marieke Gouda Bacon is the very latest flavor in the line, made in collaboration with Nolechek’s Meats, a butcher that’s local to Marieke Gouda’s home in Thorp, Wisconsin.
“They have been phenomenal. They put our Gouda in their brats and their hot dogs, so we thought we’d put their bacon in our Gouda,” Penterman says. “Bacon Gouda is really phenomenal!”
Different levitra without prescription see description factors contribute to the muscle tightness that further contributes to many bad backs. Men seek different sildenafil tablets in india approaches to stop premature ejaculation and cure impotence. Learn more significant points about this medicine via kamaggra100.com Erectile dysfunction- inability to keep or sustain healthy erections for pleasing sexual intimacy. generic soft viagra An ultrasound will viagra wholesale uk be used to monitor the activity of your heart. Marieka Gouda Foenegreek, which has won multiple awards, was one of the first cheeses Penterman made when she went into commercial production. She’d been thinking about adding walnuts to her gouda, but she’d hesitated because bringing tree nuts into a food facility is not done lightly. Then she tasted a fenugreek Gouda during a visit to the Netherlands and decided that the nutty flavor of the fenugreek seeds satisfied that craving without adding the tree nut complication, so she decided to try making it herself. It didn’t go well at first.
“It was so smelly in the house. I cooked the herbs in those days in our home kitchen,” she recalls. The simmering fenugreek smelled so bad that she changed her mind about adding it to her cheese, but then her husband, Rolf, suggested that she go ahead, give it a try and see how it turned out. “He doesn’t like to waste things,” Penterman says.
The cheese was aging when Penterman got a call from the Dairy Business Innovation Center to alert her to a 2007 competition. She picked a cheese to enter, and she asked one of her team members to pick a cheese. Rolf picked a third cheese, the Marieke Gouda Foenegreek. “Rolf picked the Foenegreek, and right away it won a gold award at the 2007 championship, so it was pretty cool,” Penterman says.
American consumers’ enthusiasm for Marieke Gouda and for Gouda cheeses in general is elevating both the availability and the quality of fine cheeses in the marketplace as cheesemakers improve their products to meet consumers’ expectations, Penterman says. “You can see the consumer starting to realize what good cheese is. Consumers are willing to spend a little extra to taste good cheese and to support local farmstead cheesemakers,” she says. “Overall cheese quality has improved. Flavor profiles are getting better. People are traveling and tasting cheeses and returning passionate about cheeses. I think that in general the quality for sure made a big jump in the last 10 years.”
By Lorrie Baumann
Face Rock Creamery is a three-year-old operation on the southern Oregon coast that’s already producing award-winning Cheddars with “in your face” flavors. Face Rock Creamery 2 Year Extra Aged Cheddar won a first place award for aged Cheddars between 12 and 24 months from the American Cheese Society in 2015 and its Vampire Slayer Garlic Cheese Curds won a first place award for flavored cheese curds in the 2013 American Cheese Society competition. “We’ve been really fortunate to win these awards right out of the gate, and it’s given us some credibility and momentum, so that’s been wonderful,” says Face Rock Creamery President Greg Drobot.
Face Rock Creamery is located in Bandon, Oregon, a town of about 3,000 people with a heritage of cheesemaking. Cheese had been made in Bandon for about 100 years from milk produced at dairies upstream along the Coquille River and barged down the river to the cheese factory that employed 50-60 of the town’s residents until 2005, when a large cheese company bought the creamery to shut it down.
Drobot happened to have moved to Bandon in 2005 to pursue a real estate project, and when the project was completed, he was looking for something else to do when local resident and friend Daniel Graham suggested that he think about starting a new creamery and reviving that part of their heritage. “I thought at first it was nuts…. I didn’t know anything about cheesemaking, but it’s such an integral part of everyone’s like here that it stuck with me,” he says. “When we reopened, we had community members coming in in tears to talk about how they felt that the cheese plant was a part of their family legacy. I’m really proud and happy that I can do that.”
Cardiothoracic surgeons accomplish surgical disease of the retina called retinitis pigmentosa If you take protease inhibitors (antiviral drugs generally used for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis) If you suffer from sickle cell or other types of anemia If cialis in österreich slovak-republic.org you are taking medication that contains sildenafil citrate, which is the main key ingredient that is present in most of the ED medications. This treatment is not brand viagra pfizer a child play. This will lead to long lasting results and the patients may experience some undesired response like nausea, vomiting, abnormal heart buy viagra prescription beat. The inhibitors restrict this activity allowing the blood to flow better through the viagra doctor free blood vessels.
He wrote a business plan, got a loan, and suddenly, he was starting a cheese business. He took his plans up to Seattle and showed them to Brad Sinko, a son of Joe Sinko, who’d owned the cheese plant before it had been bought and closed. Sinko was the founding cheesemaker for Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, another award-winning maker of fine Cheddars, and after he’d finished reviewing the drawings for the new plant, he said he might be interested in coming to work there. “He was top of the world, a rock star in the cheese community, and I didn’t even think it was a possibility that he’d come back to Bandon,” Drobot says. “I about fell off my chair when he told me that. It changed things a lot.”
Sinko moved back home to Bandon, and the plant started operating in May, 2013. The plant employs about 25 people directly and provides employment indirectly for about another 15, including delivery drivers and service providers. Holstein, Brown Swiss and Jersey cow milk is sourced from Bob and Leonard Scolari’s family dairy just up the valley, where a temperate climate and coastal rains mean that the cows can be on pasture about 70 to 80 percent of the year. Products include conventional aged Cheddars as well as flavored varieties like In Your Face, a three-pepper Cheddar; Vampire Slayer, which is flavored with garlic; and Super Slayer, which has both peppers and garlic. “Cheese is, for a lot of people, intimidating, but we want to make sure people have fun and enjoy their cheese, so that’s the route we went, especially with some of our flavors,” Drobot says. “We put kind of a fun twist on it.”
The Face Rock Creamery cheeses are currently sold in 2,500 retail locations across 10 states. “We would like to continue to move west and continue to spread the word about Face Rock,” Drobot says. “We want to continue to make wonderful cheeses. We would like to be nationally distributed. We’re never going to be a commodity cheese, we’re always going to be small batch, but the flavors have national appeal.”