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."