For centuries, cheese was little more than a practical – and pleasurable 
– way of prolonging the life of a perishable product like milk. All 
cheeses were made on an artisan scale, all of them from raw milk. With 
the dawn of associated dairying, when farmers decided to get together to 
pool their milk, the scale of the operation changed dramatically and 
cheese-making began to be industrialized.

Along with industrialization came pasteurization. In industrialized 
counties today, pasteurized cheeses are the default, raw milk cheeses 
the exception. Even in an intensely cheesy country like France, 
considered ungovernable by General de Gaulle on account of its estimated 
365 fromages, only about 17 per cent of the total output is made from 
raw milk.

Generally speaking the pasteurized lobby co-exists fairly amicably with 
the raw milk lobby. But from time to time on both sides of the Atlantic 
– particularly when yet another food scare flares up – the idea of 
banning raw milk in cheese-making re-surfaces. Between 1990 and 1992 
there was vigorous debate in the European Union about the safety of raw 
milk cheese, and the Codex Alimentarius, which provides standards for 
the international trade of cheese, was considering mandatory 
pasteurization of all dairy products.

Ranged on one side of the periodically recurring debate are those who 
argue that cheese made from raw milk is inherently unsafe. John Sheehan, 
director of the US Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Dairy and 
Egg Safety, has gone on record as saying that 'drinking raw (untreated) 
milk or eating raw milk products is like playing Russian roulette with 
your health’.

On the other side are those who hold that cheese made from pasteurized 
milk is a denatured product, which can actually cause health problems. 
Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking puts it thus : ‘Raw milk sours into 
wholesome foods because the acid-producing bacteria have certain 
advantages, including a head start, over less helpful microbes. 
Pasteurized milk, on the other hand, is nearly free of bacteria, and 
troublemakers have a better chance of prevailing’.

The Russian roulette argument is difficult to sustain, not least in view 
of the millions of people, mainly (but not exclusively) Europeans, for 
whom raw milk products have for centuries been a normal and pleasurable 
part of a healthy, balanced diet.

That cheese seethes with bacteria is an undeniable – and, for some, 
alarming – fact. But as Piero Sardo, President of Slow Food’s Foundation 
for Biodiversity and an authority on raw milk cheeses, points out, there 
are good microbes and bad microbes. It’s ludicrous (‘una grande
stupidaggine’) to tar them all with the same brush and to brand cheese 
as a dangerous food.

The vast majority of bacteria found in milk are benign. They are what 
gives cheese its particular character and flavour – indeed they enable 
the cheese-making process to happen at all. (As any cheese-maker will 
tell you, it’s much harder to make cheese from pasteurized milk because 
most of the helpful bugs have been eliminated.)

There is compelling evidence to support the theory that pasteurization 
can cause at least as many problems as it sets out to solve. As McGee 
notes, because heat-treating milk prior to cheese-making kills almost 
all known germs indiscriminately, it creates a more hospitable 
environment for bacteria that may subsequently be introduced, during the 
fabrication and ripening process. It has been repeatedly demonstrated 
that raw milk is not the culprit, but poor hygiene in the dairy and the 
cave (so-called ‘post-process contamination’).

The vast majority of cheese-related food scares have involved cheeses 
made with pasteurized milk. Dr Catherine Donnelly, microbiological 
consultant at the University of Vermont, in a study of incidents of 
cheese-related illness, observed that ‘aged raw milk cheeses have 
enjoyed a remarkable safety record’, adding that the study ‘did not find 
any compelling data to indicate that mandatory pasteurization would lead 
to a safer product’.

If the case against raw milk cheeses on health grounds appears 
inconclusive, evidence that pasteurization impacts negatively on both 
the taste and texture of cheese is compelling. Researchers at INRA, 
France’s National Agronomy Institute, conducted parallel studies where a 
traditional type of cheese was made using raw milk in one batch and 
pasteurized milk in another. They concluded that ‘pasteurization 
modified the biochemistry and micriobiology of ripening, and with it the 
flavour and texture of the cheese’.

Raw milk cheeses reflect the area in which they’re made. The French talk 
of terroir which in this context includes a host of factors from the 
type and breed of animal from whose milk the cheese is made, to the 
botanical composition of the grass she grazes, the indigenous 
cheese-making traditions of the area, the starter culture used to ripen 
the cheese from within and the place-specific microbes that ripen it 
from without.

In cheeses made from pasteurized milk, on the other hand, the question 
of local (or indeed any) identity is secondary. The milk that goes into 
them comes from several farms, which may be situated many miles away 
from the cheese factory. The starter culture comes from a laboratory and 
the environment in which the cheeses are ‘ripened’ is carefully screened 
to exclude any place-specific bacteria. The cheeses have a long shelf 
life and can be relied upon to taste the same wherever and whenever they 
are made.

Choosing raw milk cheeses is not a simple question of taste. To invest 
in a hand-made Epoisses from Burgundy, a Constant Bliss from Vermont or 
one of Charles Martell’s Stinking Bishops, is to buy into a whole way of 
life and to help sustain a tradition that may go back thousands of years 
(Switzerland’s Sbrinz was mentioned by Pliny). It’s a way of supporting 
what by definition will be an extensive form of agriculture, as opposed 
to the intensive model that produces industrial quantities of 
pasteurized cheese.

Cheese-eating monkeys who surrender to the pleasures of raw milk cheeses 
help to ensure that ancient pastures and habitats are conserved, grazed 
by animals that live out in the fresh air, not beasts confined in barns 
and fed nuggets of manufactured feed.

If – as seems likely in an age of increasing paranoia about our food, 
and with the ever-encroaching Nanny State – the question of the survival 
of raw milk cheeses crops up again, consider all the arguments and weigh 
up the evidence. Then you can decide which cheese is for you. The 
important thing is to preserve the right to choose.