One of the world's great sensual experiences, exulted in daily across Europe, is illegal in the United States. That bite you may be about to take into an unctuous and intense young French raw milk cheese oozing off the edges of a chewy chunk of bread is against the law.
No raw milk cheese aged for less than sixty days may be imported into this country, nor sold in this country by local cheesemakers. So say the regulations of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in force for the past half-century. Yet since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Americans began showing an interest in proper cheese, there hasn't been much difficulty in buying younger raw milk cheese treasures from France, England and Italy in American specialty food stores. Cheeses were sent without fanfare by FedEx direct to cheesemongers. But now the U.S. Bioterrorism Act (enacted in December 2003), which requires advance identifying paperwork for the import of all consumer goods, is likely to make it impossible any longer to slip these heavenly gems through the cracks.
And it doesn't stop there: age is no longer the only issue. The FDA is also considering mandating pasteurization of all cheeses, regardless of origin or age. This would be damaging enough to foreign exporters for a market as large as America. But now the regulations may go global. As a result of a proposal by the United States, the World Health Organization (WHO) is agitating to ban the sale by member-countries of any raw milk cheeses for trade to any country. If fully realized, the cumulative effect of these developments would be a death sentence on the international cheese industry.
