So it turns out that the flap a couple of months ago about the FDA banning cheese aged on wooden boards was not a fluke, but a sounder to see how the community at large would react.   They have now enacted rules that are threatening the importation of huge numbers of cheeses from across the globe.

The TL;DR version is that they have dropped the allowable amount of certain harmless bacteria from 100 per gram to 10 per gram.  They aren’t even trying to assert that the bacteria are harmful, but that they act as indicators of the cleanliness of the areas that they were prepared in.  There are no studies that show this to be the case.

I just happened upon this article from December 2012 in The Telegraph that reports findings that Roquefort and other moldy cheeses, have anti-inflammatory properties that may contribute to French life expectancy being 3% longer than Britain’s.  W00t!

I don’t know how many of you have wanted to comment on stuff and been stymied, but it was just brought to my attention (by my lovely wife, Kristi, who wanted to publicly note the lack of cheese curd reviews) that comments were not enabled on most of the posts here.  I typically compose all of my Stinky Cheese Tuesday write-ups in Red Matrix which is an absolutely amazing communications framework that I use for just about everything from hosting and sharing files, to social media, to blogging.  Red Matrix then cross-posts the entries here but disables comments, which I had no idea was happening.

TL;DR:  Y’all can comment on posts now, should the spirit move you!

On that fateful day in early March that I ran into Jewel-Osco’s cheesemonger and was introduced to No Woman, he informed me that I could ask the folks at the dairy counter for special orders and he would fill them for me.  Last month, I thought that this was a nice gesture.  Today, I know it is my imperative.

I started looking into some of the companies that make the cheeses I’ve been procuring and growing to love and it is fascinating!  Little tidbits like Faribault Dairy, the maker of the AmaBlue Gorgonzola (reviewed here), is the oldest operating cave aged cheese maker in the United States.  Big tidbits like Beecher Cheese‘s “World’s Best Mac & Cheese” is listed as one of Oprah’s Favorite Things and has been on the Martha Stewart Show twice.  Oh, and I am totally making that Mac & Cheese, so consider yourselves forewarned.

The biggest thing that I’m learning though, is that the cheeses that are carried by my local grocers, while varied and amazing, are not even the tip of the iceberg.  Beecher makes twelve cheeses, of which we’ve tried three.  Cabot makes nine different types of flavored cheddar, and I’ve only brought in one.  And so I need to petition the cheesemonger.  I’m thinking of trying a couple of manufacturer-centric Stinky Cheese Tuesdays where we sample several cheeses from a single manufacturer.  Maybe even some Face-Off days where we try the same type of cheese from different places and vote to see which one we like best.  Who knows?  All things are possible with cheese!