On Jan. 25, 2013, the Missouri State Milk Board (SMB) destroyed over 18 tons of raw milk cheese produced by Morningland Dairy Farm, despite questionable testing and trial procedures.
The farm had been making cheese in the Ozark Mountains for over 30 years and never received one reported case of illness. Yet federal regulators, the Missouri attorney general, and the SMB all insist that the farm’s cheese poses a danger to public health.
The trouble began far from the “Show Me State” on June 30, 2010, when officials raided Rawesome Foods, a raw health food co-op in Venice, Calif. In a scene more like a drug bust than a food safety inspection, officers stormed the private club with guns drawn, confiscating potentially hazardous yogurt, honey, and almonds.
Two kinds of Morningland raw milk cheese—garlic and hot pepper Colby—were seized in the raid. The California Department of Food and Agriculture did not test the product for a full 55 days after the bust—and it remains unclear how the sample was treated in the interim—but when lab results emerged, Missouri officials were told that both cheeses tested positive for the bacteria called listeria.
Morningland was selling cheese in over 100 different health food stores across the country at the time of the Rawesome bust, and everything matching that batch date had all been safely consumed. Nevertheless, SMB inspector Don Falls had orders to embargo all Morningland’s cheese—$250,000 worth—until further notice.
Farm owners Joe and Denise Dixon were at a prestigious Seattle cheese conference when they discovered that their dairy was in trouble. Joe Dixon said it hurt to think that his family’s hard work might have to be destroyed, but his first thought was on making things right.
“When someone says you have a problem, our first goal is to make sure we’re not going to harm anybody. Because if it’s going to harm somebody, it needs to be destroyed,” he said. “We said that if it’s really contaminated we will destroy the cheese ourselves—but prove it’s contaminated.”
Raw Milk Controversy
It is important to note that Morningland cheese was made from unpasteurized milk—a product that regulators vehemently condemn. While retail sale of raw cheese is legal in most states—and has remained a relatively safe product for thousands of years—the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) both view this food with great suspicion and concern.
In a 2012 report on raw milk, the CDC stated that before pasteurization, dairy was dangerous, and “raw milk was a common source of the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, severe streptococcal infections, typhoid fever, and other foodborne illnesses.”
