I had a birthday recently and I decided to celebrate with a bit of a Favorite Thing, French Roquefort cheese. Whole Foods had none, which amazed me -- and I noticed several other French staples were missing from the cheese counter. So I looked around the city a bit. San Diego seemed to be entirely out of French Roquefort, and many other French cheeses. I should have been cued in by the fact that all the cheeses that were missing are unpasteurized.
George Bush, whose greatest culinary adventure involved a contest with a pretzel (the pretzel won) banned Roquefort cheese. It was his final act while in office. He was pissed that the French will not eat hormone and antibiotic laden American beef. So he banned Roquefort in America. The Obama FDA unbanned it, but it was unavailable for a couple of years. Now it is unavailable again. The Obama FDA has banned it.
Why? Well the official reason is that it has more bacteria than the FDA thinks it should. Now, Roquefort cheese has been made in the same way for well over a millennium. Pliny the Elder mentioned it in AD 79. Medieval Popes accepted tithes from France paid in Roquefort cheese -- because, Roquefort cheese... gold... Roquefort cheese... g -- they'd prefer the Roquefort cheese, thank you. Nobody is ever recorded as dying of Roquefort cheese, though undoubtedly it contributed to much of the gout one reads about in older fiction.
But an American bureaucrat, who probably thinks Kraft cheeze whiz in a can is the height of haute cuisine, has decided Roquefort is unfit for American consumption.
The French live longer than Americans do -- the mean life expectancy of French women is 85.2 years; it is 82.2 years for American women. The US ranks well below France on every index of quality of life, health, education, life expectancy, nutrition, human rights, probably IQ -- you name it. Nobody else in the world has banned French Roquefort or any of the other French cheeses the sterility fetishists at the US FDA have suddenly decided to be the greatest threat to Americans' health other than Ebola. Just the Americans. Again.
There are countless things the EU health authorities fear but the FDA does not care about. Does splashing buckets of antibiotics over animal feedlots breed MRSAs? Probably. But who cares? Pharma companies make big money selling those buckets of antibiotics to agribiz! That's what the FDA is there to protect! The EU health authorities fear MRSAs; the FDA only fears loss of profits for the corporations that have captured the FDA.
But the FDA has always been terribly afraid of the bacteria in raw milk cheeses, which Europeans consume with delight. So do Americans, given the opportunity, but the large American food corporations don't really want Americans to have that opportunity, and the FDA does whatever US industry tells it to do. It seems most likely this latest ban is political payback to the French for sassing an American corporation. The French have refused to grow -- and even attempted to ban -- MON180, Monsanto's Bt "enhanced" maize. Hence Americans cannot eat Roquefort or a hundred other European cheeses. It's "science", FDA-style.
Take that, cheese-eating surrender monkeys! And you Americans, eat your Kraft single-slices of vegetable oil (probably made from MON180), food coloring, milk components and approved additives; there's a good consumer. There's no difference in quality between Kraft single-slices and Société Roquefort, you know... not to patriotic Americans.
Update: Various defenders of the FDA have appeared. One tried to argue that the cheeses are not, in fact, banned. The FDA has several different ways of preventing an import from reaching stores. They can stop it at the border without inspections, and not call that a "ban" and still prevent you from getting it. That seems to be what has happened here.
Another defender argues not that Roquefort is not banned, but that it is so dangerous we would all die if it were not banned. Europeans, he implies, die daily from eating it; in France they even have a special type of closed-casket funeral, La mort du Roquefort, for the fallen.
The problem with this theory is that the FDA itself says that no toxic E. coli strains were found in any of the banned cheeses; the number of non-toxic E. coli was simply higher than an arbitrary level that the FDA claims indicates "cleanliness". Since these cheeses are not made in the sterile manner favored by American factory food corporations and their FDA spokesmen, the non-toxic E. coli levels would be higher than in pasteurized milk: cows do contain E. coli, as do humans. The point is to ensure that they don't contain toxic strains of E. coli -- which European ag is able to do, though American ag finds this challenging.