The Sunday after federal marshals closed the Estrella cheese facility, Kelli and Anthony Estrella showed up at the Ballard Farmers' Market with stacks of lab reports and health department correspondence, as well as copies of their many cheese making awards. They stood at their table and dialogued with customers about their situation.
Earlier this year, some of Estrella's raw milk cheese tested positive for listeria in random monitoring by the Washington state health department. The couple worked with state authorities, recalling, cleaning and retesting. Despite their efforts, problems persisted. Then late in October month federal officials got involved and shut down their facility without warning.
Listeria is a tenacious bug. Unlike salmonella, it survives even in refrigerated foods. It can be dangerous to pregnant women, babies and the elderly, but we don't know much about its effects on healthy adults. It is difficult to link listeria with actual occurrences of food borne illness because it can take over a month for symptoms to appear and these are often generic and flulike. Some food scientists believe that once you start looking for listeria, you'll find it almost anywhere.
Health officials all over the country have tried to limit the production and sale of raw milk cheeses like Estrella's on the grounds that they are more likely to harbor food borne illness than their pasteurized, highly processed counterparts. Cheese aficionados insist that the flavor and health benefits of raw milk enzymes are well worth the risk.
The raw milk controversy is fertile ground for conspiracy theorists, and they have a point. The FDA and local health departments give a disproportionate amount of energy and attention to the issue. Authorities found the legal tools to shut down the Estrella Creamery, a small-scale artisan operation, but they claim to lack the authority to close industrial meat facilities linked to verifiable clusters of food borne illnesses involving millions of pounds of contaminated meat.
Every year at one of the local farmers' market vendor meetings, a board representative gets up and reminds us of the importance of rigorously following food safety protocols. He explains that, as market vendors, we are all responsible for keeping our products clean and safe, and that a highly publicized incident of food borne illness would affect all of us, spreading the perception that farmers' market products are unsafe in general.
I've heard farmers and market vendors expressing compassion for the Estrellas while also worrying about the effect the incident could have on general perceptions about the safety of market food. Each of us has chosen in our own way to sell food outside of mainstream channels, so we take the issue personally.
Estrella's product tested positive for a bug that shouldn't have been there. But the situation has many shades of gray, including the incomplete science about listeria and the fact that, as far as we know, there have been no illnesses directly linked to their cheese.
Coincidentally, the Estrella case has been in the news just as Congress was debating the recent food safety bill. We want the government to hold big companies accountable but we are also angry at these same agencies for being so hard on one of our own, especially a lovely couple who has demonstrated a willingness to comply with reasonable regulatory measures.
In the meantime, I miss their cheese.
