Bob Haase’s Another Can Of Worms

FDA Bans Using Boards for Cheese Making

I recently wrote about the Food and Drug Administration and how they are funded.  It seems that over half of the funding for the FDA comes from the companies they are supposed to be monitoring for food safety.  The problem with this is that many of the harmful ingredients that food manufacturers put into our food are approved by the FDA, but yet banned in many if not most European countries.  An example is all the food dyes that are put into our foods are not allowed in many other countries.

I guess the Wisconsin cheese makers and other cheese makers around United States are not paying to help fund the FDA.  I say this because the FDA just issued a ban on using wooden boards in the cheese making process.  The traditional process of aging cheese on wooden boards has been used for centuries without any documented case of health issues.  There is no record of people becoming ill by eating food aged on wooden boards, but there are many cases of people becoming ill and even dying because of the additives and alterations of our processed foods such as the use of food dyes.

Wisconsin is the cheese state and we have some of the best cheeses in the world.  The process of using the wooden boards is what helps give the cheeses the unique flavors.  Most American made cheeses are aged on wooden boards so this will affect most of the cheese makers in Wisconsin and the rest of the United States.  This may force many of the small cheese makers to close shop and go out of business.  This would be good for the large companies like Kraft that make their money selling processed cheeses that contain the chemicals and additives approved by the FDA.  Do you see a connection here.  I can’t prove it but something smells and it isn’t the cheese.

Look at the ingredients on processed cheeses and compare them to the quality cheese our Wisconsin cheese makers produce.  I don’t like eating processed cheese because of the additives and because they don’t taste like the cheese our great artisan cheese makers in Wisconsin produce.  Would you prefer to eat Velveeta or some good Wisconsin cheddar? 

The cheese sits on wooden boards as they age and this helps contribute to their flavor.  There is probably a better safety record for people eating these cheeses than just about any other food we consume and yet the FDA wants to put a stop to this.  If the use of these boards were really a health and safety problem causing people to get sick, I would support their ban on the use of these boards, but it is not.  I think there is a greater risk to our health eating processed cheese than eating the great Wisconsin cheeses made on these wooden boards. 

Maybe the greatest risk is the FDA.  I think the FDA and Politics have a lot in common.  When the financial support for the FDA or the Politicians come from big companies with big bucks, who are they going to support and how does it affect us?  Don’t take away the use of boards in cheese making… take away the financing of the FDA by the companies they are suppose to be inspecting.  

Bob Haase is the host of “Outdoors Thursday” heard Thursday mornings at 9:10 a.m. on News-Talk 1450 KFIZ.