According to a report in an industry publication, Cheese Reporter, a top dairy official at the FDA, Stephen Sundlof, director of its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) believes that the 60-day aging period “is not effective in reducing pathogens in raw milk cheeses.” There needs to be “some other risk management steps” that could be applied. Sundlof said at a dairy conference last month. What makes him think that the 60-day period isn’t effective in reducing pathogens? A little birdie must have told him so.

A change in the aging period regulation could put a crimp on production of a number of raw milk soft cheeses like brie and camembert, among others. Some producers already struggle with the 60-day aging requirement, since certain cheeses are best sold sooner than that, and letting them age for 60 days simply reduces their viable shelf lives.

Moreover, the FDA isn’t proposing to extend the aging period, but rather to require processing of the milk, including pasteurization of milk for certain cheeses.

Unfortunately the Cheese Reporter story is no longer at the link so I have few details, but this looks like another overreaction from the FDA.

The owners of Chocolate Moose, which sells quirky gifts and jewelry as well as candy, were certain the tax didn’t apply to them. Although they received the notice the district sent to all retail food establishments, candy accounts for just 10% or 20% of sales, says co-owner Marcia Levi. “I don’t consider myself a food establishment,” she says. When another store owner asked what she was going to do about the regulation, she decided to call the city, just to be on the safe side. “I explained to them the situation—that only a small part of my business is food,” she said. “They said it does not matter.”

I can’t imagine the headaches this bantamweight bean counting must be inducing in store owners:

Stores keep one cent of every five cents they charge for bags, and two cents if they give customers a credit of at least five cents for each bag (of any sort) that they bring to the store. That provision forced clerks at one local Giant supermarket to intervene in every purchase at every self-check-out terminal to authorize the credit. Under no circumstances, the law says, are stores allowed to pick up the five-cent fee for their customers.

Now imagine your check-out isn’t automated and you have to keep track of how many bags leave your shop so you know how much to pay John Q. Law — or be fined.

At least DC has the manzanas to call it a “tax.” In Connecticut, an identical “fee” was introduced last year by Representative Kim Fawcett but it fell by the wayside once Fawcett, a Democrat, pissed away her political capital voting against gay marriage — this in a state where the Republican governor signed it into law. Fawcett then promptly ran over her own daughter. Man, that was a crazy spring.

Although it is not illegal to consume raw milk in Canada, selling or distributing violates laws that require pasteurization of most commercial milk products.

The Schmidt case, which began when his farm was raided in 2006, has captivated food-rights academics and advocates in Canada, and around the world, who argue the court’s decision will ripple well beyond the raw-milk community. At its crux, they argue, the case is really about the extent to which consumers should be free to buy foods, however rarefied, and whether constitutional rights stretch as far as the grocery basket, farmer’s market and the people who own shares in – but do not live on – food-producing farms.

[Thanks to Kimberly Hartke for the tip. My article on raw milk for Reason is here, and a visit to a Virginia cow share program here.]

Whenever I think I should, or in fact do, reduce my meat consumption, something like this comes out.  Then I regret having contributed to  both global warming and general idiocy by having had beans for dinner, and I go buy a steak ( which, incidentally, is supposed to be a deal now.)

Lord Stern,  this steak’s  for you!

“Some hae meat and cannae eat
Some would eat that want it
But we hae meat and we can eat
Sae let the Lord be thankit!”

HT: L. Coyle.

Wine and scantily clad women may sound like some cad’s idea of a good time, but the combo spells trouble in Alabama, which last week banned the sale of a California-made wine bottle adorned with a naked nymph — helping boost its sales elsewhere in the nation.

Pursuant to the state’s administrative code, the Alabama Beverage Control Board ordered Hahn Family Wines to remove its Cycles Gladiator wines from shelves throughout the state, calling its label “immodest.” According to Hahn president Bill Legion, a small state board in Alabama rejected the artwork last year, but the ruling did not catch Legion’s eye. His apparent defiance of the state’s decision — he claims the paperwork “fell through the cracks” — led to the ban.

“It’s turned out to be a great thing for us,” laughs Legion, who says he’s received calls of support from oenophiles around the world.

The bottle’s eyebrow-raising label was designed in homage to a classic 1890s print ad featuring a lithe, long-haired cyclist clinging to a bicycle shuttling through a starry sky. The belle époque illustration has since become a popular poster, affixed to bike-shop bulletin boards and wannabe road racers’ walls.

Click through to see the label, which I think is perfectly delightful. Maybe Free the Hops will take on prudishness next?

The sausage is verboten because it’s made on the farm, and any kind of meat product must be prepared in a kitchen that adheres to provincial safety regulations, even if it uses meat slaughtered in a government-inspected facility.

The microbial risks taken by raw milk nuts are nothing compared to the legal risks faced by their suppliers.

The farmers who provide foodies with their fix are taking a risk. Last year, a man in eastern Ontario was fined $3,000 for selling un-graded eggs to restaurants. And the Saturday-morning farmer’s cows aren’t even part of the quota system. In Canada, dairy farmers must sell their milk through provincial marketing boards, not on the free market. If caught, she could face serious penalties.

A recent study found that $10 wine tastes better if the drinker thinks it’s $90 wine (”with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure”). The same phenomenon is probably at least partically responsible for raptures over illegal duck eggs and summer sausage. The price is only part of the cost, and an egg custard that might land you in the pokey is bound to be more delicious than a legit dessert make from supermarket eggs.

Still, I tried (legal) duck eggs last summer on Long Island, and (controlling as well as I can for my own neurological quirks) I think they they were legitimately above average in their sapidity. It’s shame Canadian farmers have to slip their best customers sausage on the sly.

Via Overlawyered

Cross-posted at Reason.com

“I just put it on the market,” [Stew Leonard, Jr.] said Wednesday. “Why not see what happens? We want to leave all our options open. We’re not looking at opening anything in Connecticut.”

Instead, Leonard said, his focus is on opening new stores in New York and New Jersey, where the real estate market is booming.

Since 1996, the town of Orange, CT has been fighting Stew’s from opening the store, complaining it will bring increased crime, traffic, and infrastructure stress to the suburb. This despite the parcel being a cornfield adjacent to I-95, where customers could zoom off and on the highway without looting or flushing too many toilets while visiting, and despite Orange being full of such mom-and-pop stores like Lowe’s, Target, and Home Depot (I love Home Depot. They have everything — except the item you’re looking for). And also despite Stew Leonard’s being one of Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For eight years in a row or simply a great place to buy milk from local farms or coffee roasted right in the store.

So congratulations, town of Orange, CT. Your short-sightedness and buggering of local businesses and farms during an economic downturn is an inspiration to government everywhere. Hey! Want to be in charge of my health care?

But serious Old Dominion boozehounds see a ray of hope in their tequila sunrises: Former state attorney general and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell proposed privatizing the whole mess in a press conference yesterday, conducted (seriously!) in a parking garage.

The idea is win-win. End 75 years of incompetent state alcohol sales management and the state gets a bunch of cash for transportation spending when it sells off the rights to run a private liquor store.

In case you’re waffling on whether this is a good idea, go spend 5 minutes on Virginia’s weirdly self-congratulatory booze biz website. Historic photos celebrate milestones. Like 1970, when the first lady clerk, Betty Wilson, was hired. Thank goodness government was running that rum, how would we have achieved gender equality otherwise? (Note: I think the guy in my local liquor store in nearby Alexandria is still wearing her coat.) Lady boozemongers were an innovation that appeared just a couple of years after Virginia started licensing sales of “liquor by the drink” in bars.

In its early history, Virginia ABC agents were also enforcers of anti-bootlegging and moonshining laws, allowing the government run stores to deal very effectively with private competition.

Cross-posted at Reason.com.

Sainbury’s spokeswoman Lucy Maclennan said: “We are delighted to have played a part in winning the wonky veg war against these bonkers EU regulations.”

Tesco spokesman Adam Fisher said: “It’s not before time. We welcome this move.”

And last night it was predicted the change could see some prices fall by 40 PER CENT.

More here. We here at Crispy let you know about plans to lift the ban last June.

I detest Jim Graham. He is a restaurant hater. He was instrumental in passing DC’s smoking ban, and since then has opposed such evils as the sale of single beers. Yet voters in his ward continue to elect Graham.

I have a feeling that might now change. Graham’s latest anti-restaurant play is so outrageous and so out of touch with reality that Graham’s supporters will have to see the light. Right?

Why is Graham’s latest ban attempt so unconscionable? I’ll tell you why. Jim Graham wants to ban the sale of pizza slices. Says their sale spurs violence.

This could mean the end of the jumbo slice–which along with the half smoke is one of DC’s few culinary contributions to the world. But this is just the continuation of a pattern the council–especially Graham–has been evincing for several years. As former DCist editor Ryan Avent wrote of Graham and the council in 2007:

In the past year as well, Council members, and particularly Ward 1 representative Jim Graham, have acted swiftly to close down District businesses connected with crimes, even when it appears that there was little the business could have done to stop the criminal act. Increasingly, it seems that the Council’s first inclination when faced with a problem is to restrict choice.

DCist has more on the proposed pizza slice ban here, and Graham’s anti-business grandstanding here.

Tell Graham how you feel about his proposal either by email (jim@grahamwone.com) or phone (202.724.8181). Tell him Crispy sent you.