We now have the Cheesiest Government in the World - Cheeseboarder Patrol

"Milton Friedman's great dictum: Don't wait to elect the right people to do the right things. Create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things."

Unfortunately, it appears this will never take with the ignoramus ideologue in the White House. m/r

Cheeseboarder Patrol :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn  •  Jun 12, 2014 

I'll be keeping my weekly radio date with Hugh Hewitt, live coast to coast at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific. I imagine Iraqwill figure, as well as the post-Cantor GOP.

~The easiest operating principle for American life is to assume that everything you like is illegal. If it isn't, it soon will be. For a thousand years, cheese - real cheese, that is; not the orange rubber sold under that name at Price-Chopper - has been aged on wooden boards. But that's no reason not to crack down on it. Enter the US Department of Agriculture's Office of Food Safety and Nutrition's Dairy and Egg Branch:

In a response early this year, Monica Metz, chief of the dairy and egg branch at the FDA's Office of Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, wrote that using wooden boards for aging cheese doesn't conform to established good manufacturing standards because the boards cannot be "adequately cleaned and sanitized."

One of the problems with scrupulously "sanitized" food is that it doesn't taste of anything very much, which may be why people consume it in large quantities: With food, if the taste doesn't satisfy you, you chow until the sheer quantity does. I've no research on the subject and my theory may be as full of holes as a Swiss cheese, but the fact is that the federalization of food has coincided with the massive expansion of obesity in America, and I'm inclined to think these two things are not unrelated. But don't worry, wood-aged cheese is not technically illegal, yet:

The FDA tried to clarify its position Tuesday, saying that Metz's reply was merely a response to questions, not a statement of policy. The agency said in a statement that it has no new policy in place and has never taken an enforcement action "based solely on the use of wooden shelves."

Late Wednesday, the FDA released another update, reassuring cheesemakers that the agency has little interest in cracking down on the age-old use of wooden boards and calling reports to the contrary inaccurate.

"To be clear, we have not and are not prohibiting or banning the long-standing practice of using wood shelving in artisanal cheese," the FDA said in the statement, acknowledging that the language used in its correspondence with New York regulators "may have appeared more definitive than it should have, in light of the agency's actual practices on this issue."The FDA's initial explanation offered little clarity — and apparently little comfort — to specialty cheesemakers from New York to Wisconsin to California, who worried that their livelihoods may be upended over something they say has never caused a problem.

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