Cheesemakers, chefs and foodies could soon have access to a banned substance at the centre of a heated debate.
Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) is reviewing whether to allow soft cheeses to be made with raw milk.
Current regulations require most cheeses to be made from pasteurised milk – a process of heating the milk to kill bacteria, including listeria, e coli and salmonella.
Foodies such as Tasmanian sheep milk cheesemaker Nicole Gilliver argue the process also killed flavour.
“Unfortunately what happens with pasteurisation is often the good and bad bacteria are killed in the process,” she said.
“(That) means for us as artisans, we potentially compromise colonies of bacteria that can drive flavour for us.”
She was hoping the review would give local producers more options and allow them to compete with European imports.
“We go into a marketplace where consumers are of the opinion that European cheeses are superior… and they often consider Aussie cheeses to be a second choice,” she said.
Former food critic and presenter of the Gourmet Farmer TV series Matthew Evans is also joining the campaign.
He said the rules preventing use of raw milk in cheese made Australia look like a “culinary backwater”.
“Raw milk products like cheese, fresh cheese in particular if you make it at home, is far more dangerous than stuff you would buy in a shop or stuff you would make from pasteurised milk,” he said.
“But it’s much less dangerous than things like oysters or seafood, it’s much less dangerous than chicken or eggs, and we don’t stop people from buying raw oysters or buying raw eggs and trusting them to know what to do with it.”
Food regulator takes ‘conservative approach’
Over the past few years, listeria outbreaks have been responsible for a number of product recalls as well as three deaths and a miscarriage just last year.
Food Standards Australia New Zealand CEO Steve McCutcheon said criticisms of the regulator’s conservative approach were unfair.
“Regulators across the board in Australia have a responsibility to protect public health and safety and so, as a result of that, they’ll always take a very conservative approach to make sure that any new product that appears on the market is not going to create food-borne illness on a mass scale,” he said.
The food safety body is weighing those risks with dozens of submissions it has received.
“By and large, they’ve generally been supportive and we’ve had submissions from both industry, particularly small cheese manufacturers, from dairy enforcement agencies and of course from consumers,” he said.
FSANZ will hand down its decision in December and if approved, raw milk cheeses could be on Australian plates by early 2015.
Hobart chef Luke Burgess is keen to put it on his menu.
“Based on the artisinal crafsmanship of some of those cheeses, they are quite exemplary and delicious, as well,” he said.
He believes avoiding the pasteurisation process allows cheeses to retain the unique flavour of where they are produced.
“In terms of where the animal’s been grazing, high pasture, low pasture, spring, eating flowers, all those notes can come through in the milk,” he said.
And he, like many foodies, wants to know what Tasmania tastes like.
“The disadvantage (if the review is rejected) is we’ll never know the true expression of here, you know – what’s spring grass like in the south of Tasmania,” Mr Burgess said.