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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: Homestead <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Food regulation work-around
  • Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 11:14:34 -0700

Disclaimer: I do not present this as an encouragement for law- breaking. All who know me here know that I always toe the legal line and have not an anarchist bone in my body. This is presented merely as interesting anecdotal information on what others are doing to offer food that they and their customers deem superior to what government regulators allow. Proceed at your own comfort level.

Excerpted from Travel + Leisure magazine, January 2007, page 62. The article title is Flirting With The Forbidden and is authored by Peter Jon Lindberg.

"It was through [Steven] Jenkins ['one of America's leading cheese experts'] that I learned of a dairy farmer who's cleverly showing up the Law: Mary Falk, owner of Love Tree Farm in Grantsburg, Wisconsin. Falk is crafting a soft, chalky specimen from the raw milk of a Jersey cow and aging it for just six weeks, 18 days fewer than the legal requirement. Ergo, this cheese--about which Jenkins raves, "I've never tasted anything so good in my whole life"--is illegal to sell for human consumption. Which is why Falk sells it under the label Fishbait.

"As long as customers are warned that this beautiful wheel of creamy goodness is for catching trout, not eating (nudge-nudge, wink-wink), Fishbait is legal. But is it safe? Consider that the FDA allows store- bought milk to have a maximum bacteria 'plate count' of 20,000. Love Tree Farm's milk averages fewer than 5,000--and it retains all its natural vitamin content. Yet raw milk is illegal in almost half of the country.

"As always, loopholes exist. There's now a growing trend toward 'cow- share' collectives, set up by dairy farms, that, in exchange for a modest buy-in, provide members with raw milk and yogurt. Like Fishbait cheese, this is quasi-legal: most state laws prohibit only the sale of unpasteurized milk. But the cow's owners--in this case, all 417 of them--are perfectly entitled to consume it."








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