They can’t see or smell the bacteria, therefore the bacteria don’t really exist, and it can’t be their fault.

(It reminds me of my father’s comment about using raw milk: you’d better know the cows it came from.)

My, my, Mr. Bogg, you sure took the long way to get to that punchline. But truth be told, I thoroughly enjoyed every curd word.

I am really moooved by Mr. York’s testimony. He should be commended for finding another whey to Cheesus.

Not a gouda way to die.

What, their Swiss is Holy now?

Cheese is dangerous!

Cheesus is Lard.

So glad that I dislike cheese and won’t be going to Cheesus anytime soon – or at least not because I ate da cheese…

I wonder if Eddie Muenster is cheesed off about this shocking display of government overreach?

I don’t care jack about Morningland’s being bleu, but I do hear that cheese keeps you fromage-ing.

Damn, I almost felt sorry for the Morningland people, but… nothing against raw milk if that’s what you choose, but, I heartily agree with PJEvans’s dad. Buying it from a dairy in another state, where I’ve never met the cows or the cheese makers…I don’t think so.
But most of all, they do it the way it says in the Bible….oh, yes, that’s reassuring.

Can’t…take…the…pain…

The defense also presented testimony from Jedadiah York, Morningland’s plant manager, who described the cheesemaking process and attested to the fact that the dairy’s equipment was sanitized before and after use each day. He added, “Everything we do is held responsible to God. His Word, the Bible, tells us how we’re supposed to act. We feel like we’re personally responsible for our product and what we do.”

Off with his head!

No. I’m not proud of that, but remember, this is free…

Ahhh, don’t worry about it. Havarti forgiven you.

Note: after perusing some of the articles from Food Safety News, I’m giving serious consideration to giving up eating altogether.

I was in a band called Death Cheese in college. We did Dead Milkmen covers.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

For they shall be called children of Gouda.

If the farmers weren’t god-botherers, Hoft would probably consider them dirty fucking hippies. But because they invoked the Bible, he’s on their side.

Is it really necessary to have someone named Blamey testifying for the State? In this case, it’s perfect. If Moringland signed an agreement to cease production, then that’s when the cheese really got binding.

Railing against the Missouri Milk Board is taking a, shall we say, expansive view of The State.

Did someone around here just cut the cheese? Pee you!

That cheesy comment probably closes the day’s competition for the innertubz.

My father grew up on a dairy. I don’t think he ever bought raw milk. The only time I did it was when they had nothing else at the store, and it was going to be cooked.

Yet another lost battle in the War on Science from the TheoCon right.

So…putting diseased milk through sterilized tubes (etc) suddenly makes it clean?

Why do they even bother sterilizing the equipment?

God damn namby-pamby nanny state. It’s right there in the effin’ Constitution: “A well regulated Dairy Industry, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of incompetent bible-thumpers to grow and distribute Staphylococcus aureus and Listeria monocytogenes, shall not be infringed.”

They can pry that goat cheese from my cold, dead fingers… (that won’t be long if I eat the damn thing, of course, but it’s the idea that counts).

Only half-joking, I noted that the reason why we can’t pass and enforce an assault weapons ban is that the craziest among us think they’ll need those weapons to fight off the evil gubmint tyranny heralded by new food labeling requirements.

Leave it to Jim Hoft, Dumbest Motherfucker on the Internets, to connect the dots and make my joke into reality…less than 30 days later.

Ah, I dunno about this one. I can well believe that the state milk board gets polite phone calls and brown envelopes from Udder Cruelty, Inc. with its 5,000-cow automated moojuice factories about those raw milk dairies run by yokels. But that’s good ol’ boy state politics.

The big corporate conglomerates who put actual shit into the food chain — and bacteria that actually kill people — don’t get shut down.

Yikes! Just read the first piece at that link.

Makes me wish I had land to grow everything I eat myself.

These goddamn Obama conspiracies get so deep, man. Lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous.

I’ve had many raw milk cheeses and they are always superior to their pasteurized versions. In France where they are cheese crazy, the best cheeses are always raw.

Listeria monocytogenes during pregnancy is nature’s way of performing an abortion. Takes the government out of the loop.

You checked your temp lately? It looks like your fever is a lot higher than normal.

Also, too, @Burnsie above: “Listeria monocytogenes during pregnancy is nature’s way of performing an abortion”
So, wouldn’t that make Morningland Dairy an accessory to first-degree murder? You’d think Mr. Hoft would be concerned about that possibility. Won’t Someone Think of the Babies?!

As Paul Newman counseled in the movie Hud, “You gonna let them shoot your cows out from under you on account of a schoolbook disease?”

As for this:

“Everything we do is held responsible to God. His Word, the Bible, tells us how we’re supposed to act. We feel like we’re personally responsible for our product and what we do.”

I guess that’s what comes of grasping onto a theology in which being baptized by the Holy Spirit (or born again in Christ or however the heck it’s supposed to work) means that all your troubles are over and you’re incapable of doing anything wrong ever again because your soul’s been saved. “I’m a Good Man[TM], it must be someone else’s fault!”

The big corporate conglomerates who put actual shit into the food chain — and bacteria that actually kill people — don’t get shut down.

That’s probably more to the point, and it’s something that occured to me as well. It’s likely that BigDairyInc is the “man behind the curtain” yanking the chains on the small yokel dairies, who are providing some unwanted competition for dairy products. Usually is what happens.

For all the yammering allegedly in “favor” of “small enterprises,” it’s the big corporations who make sure they don’t have too much competition. The issue isn’t about regulations. It’s about how the game is played. But then: that’s complicated, so let’s simplify it for the rubes.

Trust Jim Hoft, though, to come up with a simplistic Big Gubmint BAAAD theory to poop out to the dittoheads. The irony being that it’s the same Big Gubmint aiding and abetting BigDairyInc, but of course, Hoft ain’t gonna point that out. Nosireebob!

When Chic-Fil-A was in trouble the right rounded up the troops and ate at the restaurant to show their support. Why don’t they do the same thing now by eating as much Morningland Cheese as possible? If anyone accidentally aborts their child it is just God’s will, which should not be questioned.

I had listeria once. I would have retroactively aborted myself to make the misery stop.

Good for you, Bob. And good for France. However… I do not believe that in France or anywhere else in Europe where there is a knowledgeable tradition for making cheese, the standard is ““Everything we do is held responsible to God. His Word, the Bible, tells us how we’re supposed to act.”

http://www.slowfood.com/slowcheese/eng/52/europe

here is a brief bit of info found there:
Microbiological characteristics of raw-milk cheese

Moving on from milk to cheese, it is necessary to guarantee the following through regular analyses:
- the absence of Listeria monocytogenes
- the absence of Salmonella
- the absence of staphylococcal enterotoxins
- the control of the presence of bacteria indicating poor hygiene (Escherichia coli and coagulase-negative staphylococci)

Somehow, you would think that god-botherers who believe in all kinds of things they cannot see, would instinctively understand the evil lurking in a petrie dish or dancing on the head of a pin.

Oh, that’s right. It’s science, so it needs to be discounted as an inferior concept when compared to “being accountable to God”.

I think that rather than destroying the cheese, they should have given it away free to conservative groups for their personal consumption.

Don’t you think York & the dairy’s owners thought at least they’d be able to live off the cheese if the gov’t hadn’t taken it( what with the $250,000 loss & all).Living off it all the while trusting Cheesus not to let it harm them.

What you all are missing is that Staphylococcus aureus and Listeria monocytogenes are also God’s creatures too, also. By killing them with all that high-falutin’ sciencey stuff, the Missouri State Milk Board is trying to force Morningside Dairy to abort innocent bacteria!

You see? Food poisoning is like getting pregnant from rape – it’s really a blessing!

And we should encourage all of our wingnut brethren and sisteren to consume as much of Morningside Dairy’s raw milk cheese as possible, washed down with lost of unpasteurized Freedom Milk! (Or maybe with lead paint, because them jackbooted gummint thugs have banned that as well.) Because FREEDOM! TYRANNY! FOOD!

I can see them now, trying to shout WOLVERINES! while praising their porcelain God.

I think the problem is the fresh and less-aged cheeses. The ones that have to be aged for three months or more are safe, AFAIK.

The big dairies have enough money to take care of their equipment. Most of them aren’t producing and selling unpasteurized milk, either.
In the dairy business, cleanliness is godliness.

Glad you are feeling better and the snark is back.

Bacteria are just “a lie from the pit of hell.”

I was not defending the actions of the dairy in this case. Just pointing out why there is a demand for the product.

This blog may be free, but the indirect costs involved in coffee removal from innocently bystanding equipment are significant. Great comments, though.

Indeed, These guys: http://www.sierranevadacheese.com/goats_milk_products.php

Make an incredible raw goat cheddar, but do not produce raw goat chevre. Still the best chevre I have had though.

Think of it as an entry fee. Once you’ve ruined your first monitor and keyboard, you learn to set the coffee mug down *before* you start to read.

After you pay the entry fee, then it’s free every day thereafter.

Of course, if you’d like to stimulate the economy by increasing the demand for new keyboards and monitors, there’s a big red button up above the banner at the top of the page marked “become a member” that you can push . . .

I made it a rule to never patronize businesses that make their xtian connection an out-front justification for how wonderful they (and their wares) are. It has saved me a lot of headache (and it looks like stomache, too) for quite some time.

If these clowns had so much faith in gawd, then they would ‘know’ that their all-powerful sky fairy would pluck them up from the wrath their evil oppressors.

Wonder what Justin Brieber thinks of raw milk?
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/09/nice-show-justin-beiber-upchucks-on-stage-during-concert-video/

Hoft needs to sent out to pasteur.

A serious question. How well could a small, family-run cheese-maker monitor possible bacterial contamination of their products? I took a spot of microbiology as an undergrad and I could probably still figure out how to identify certain pathogens–given time, equipment, and a bit of reading–in a single sample. But I’m guessing that in order to monitor the output of even a small cheese factory is a lot more work than just incubating some plates and running some tests.

“I made it a rule to never patronize businesses that make their xtian connection an out-front justification for how wonderful they (and their wares) are.”

Probably a wise rule. Anyone who is that conspicuously religious isn’t likely to be entirely trustworthy. It tells you that pride is at work, and isn’t pride said to be a sin?

I know that evangelical types like to trumpet their worship from the rooftops–name-dropping God and Jesus at every opportunity, speaking in prayerful tones and even bragging about praying, and so forth. It’s like a cop-show detective flashing his badge to let you know he’s one of the good guys. Thing is, if you’re that sort of person, boasting about Jesus doesn’t make me think you’re a good person–rather the opposite in fact.

Pynchon stole the title of my autobiography.

This is one of the densest collections of puns I’ve encountered. Good stuff people. Tea cup was left well removed from keyboard.

Interesting points. I once vacationed in Highland Scotland, in a little cottage up the road from a small dairy farm run by a young couple who were former white-collar professionals from England who’d decided to go back to the land. They had a small pasture-grazed herd and sold the raw milk to dairy product companies in other parts of the UK (i.e., they didn’t bottle milk or make cheese or butter themselves). I got friendly with the woman because 2 of the calves were being kept temporarily in a shed in the back cottage garden, and we’d go out to feed them and chat. She explained that the local testing office sent inspectors out regularly to test both their cows and their milk, a requirement to maintain the license to sell it.

Since the Missouri expert said the likely source of contamination was “at the animal level”, that argues poor sanitation at the farm, not the cheese factory. Were the Morningland people making cheese from outsourced milk? Or not? Whose responsibility? Deep waters.

I kinda suspect the involvement of Udder Cruelty, LLC, somewhere along the line.

As for the godly cheesemakers, should they not churn the other cheek?

Also, you haven’t experienced suction until a well-grown calf has sucked on your thumb. Pull it right out of the socket, he will. Those little bovines were adorable. And the sound of a herd ambling by in the lane at sunset, complete with tinkling bells, is one of the world’s more peaceful experiences. The dairy farmeress said that they all had very distinct personalities, and one got very fond of them in a hurry.

I know in Galt’s Gulch…you are free to eat all the contaminated meats and cheeses that you can shove in your gaping maw without the nanny state hovering over you warning about about fever, nausea, diarrhea, and possible miscarriage or stillbirth if you are pregnant,

Here’s a family that decided to “go Galt” back in 1936. They had absolutely no problems with government regulation of any kind. Absolutely no cheese of any kind, either.

Good for Scotland! That’s the sort of thing that should and could be done here, but of course that would put small dairies on an equal footing with the big ones.

Consider that, on a cow, there’s not much distance between the poop/pee chutes and the milk spigots, and one understands why cleanliness is so important. One of my former bosses grew up on a farm and used to drink raw milk squirted straight from the teat across the air and into his mouth — but stopped doing that when he got laid up for a week because of it.

I do not believe that in France or anywhere else in Europe where there is a knowledgeable tradition for making cheese, the standard is ““Everything we do is held responsible to God. His Word, the Bible, tells us how we’re supposed to act.”

That’s a wee bit unfair. If you look at a lot of the small dairy producers in MO (and elsewhere) a lot of them are Amish/Mennonite, and they’ve stuck with old school crop rotation and pasturing practices. And I imagine that the monastic cheesemakers (blessed be!) and brewers of Euroland wouldn’t consider that standard invalid as a broad sense, even if they accompany it with non-medieval sanitation.

There’s a sweet spot somewhere between “my religion guides me towards being a good steward of the land and the animals I farm” and “there ain’t no bacteria in the Bible”.

Like the anti-vaccination dumbassery, this is one of those maddening “science are evil!” things that is bought into by far too many people on the left. God only knows how many shares I’ve seen on Facebook from hippie friends of mine wailing about jackbooted thugs confiscating $32/gallon artisanal half-n-half. Though I think the merchants they’re defending aren’t thumpers but more the Birkenstock crowd.

Opposition to reasonable and scientifically supported public health measures is a game for teabaggers.

The key word to watch for in this brand of bullshit is “healthful.”

Two words I could live without in future marketing campaigns: “artisanal” and “hand-crafted.” As in “artisinal cheeses,” and “hand-crafted lattes.” Whole Foods is one of the biggest offenders. They’re run by Republicans–although given the number of employees with donut holes in their ears, you’d never guess.