Why I Bought Estrella Cheese Last Weekend

The immediate and obvious reason why I bought Estrella cheese last weekend was because it's outrageously wonderful cheese, made by nice people, and I wanted some. I got a chunk of the Old Apple Tree Tomme, my long time favorite, and I've been enjoying it for breakfast all week.

The other reason I bought Estrella cheese last weekend was because I heard some of their cheeses had been recalled because of possible listeria contamination. That may be a strange reason to buy cheese, but I didn't feel like there was a real danger. The recalled cheese, by definition, was no longer available for sale. As far as anyone knows, nobody even actually got sick from it. Some microbes showed up on a random preemptive FDA test, so Estrella was told to recall the product and they complied.

To me this seemed like a perfect example of the system at work. I like to think that maybe one of the reasons why nobody got sick was because of the dairy's limited distribution, and the fact that whatever contamination there may have been was extremely contained. Unlike the e coli spinach incident a few years ago, harmful bacteria was not processed along with product that was shipped to 50 states under a variety of brand names. This was all Estrella cheese.

I don't know how this contamination happened, but I do know from my own experience that food borne illnesses are a fact of life in the industry, even when you're careful. It's like taking good care of your health and getting sick occasionally anyway. A company should take responsibility, recall contaminated product, track the problem to its source, and take steps to prevent it from happening again in the future. But if there's every indication that a company is handling a problem responsibly, I'm not sure what we gain, as consumers, by treating them like pariahs.