MOLI VIEW™

Pasteurization is one of the most misunderstood issues in American cheesemaking. Just witness the following two recent dialogs that I've had with cheese-savvy people.

I asked an editor, who frequently travels to Europe, where he buys his cheese when he's home in New York City. My hope was to lure him to The Bedford Cheese Shop, so that I could introduce him to great cheese and turn our acquaintance into a friendship.

"Oh I try not to buy cheese in the States," he wrote back. "It's all pasteurized."

A few months later I was finishing hashing out some issues with my literary agent, who lives down the street from Bedford Cheese, when I asked why I never see her in the shop.

"Oh, I'd love to come by more but I'm afraid all the cheese is unpasteurized, and I'm expecting."

The interesting thing about these seemingly contradictory statements is that they are both mostly right.

Pasteurization involves heating milk to temperatures a few degrees short of boiling for a short period of time to diminish the presence of harmful bacteria. Studies have shown that Listeria and E. coli bacteria are found a little bit more (a fraction of one percent) in samples of unpasteurized milk than in pasteurized milk.

You can see why my agent wouldn't want to risk exposing her unborn child to raw milk. She did begin coming to the shop — not for cheese, but for pickles, which are both the new rage and, of course, a classic object of pregnancy craving.

But — as critical readers might note — pasteurization has been around for less than two centuries; cheese has been eaten for more than two millennia. If unpasteurized — or "raw-milk," in cheese-lover parlance — cheeses were truly harmful, then wouldn't Europe have ceased to exist long before the Roman Empire fell?

Previous Page  1  2  3  Next Page