The Portland Press Herald has published a front page story about one topic at the Transatlantic Trade Partnership negotiations of restrictions on using protected Geographic Indicators (“GI”s) in the trade names of cheeses. A trade agreement could ban the use of these GIs when exporting US cheese to other countries and could possible also ban the use of these GIs in US made sales sold in the US. This could affect Brie, Camembert, Gorgonzola, Gouda, Parmesan and even Feta (which is already a protected GI in Europe). A number of Guild members shared their thoughts with the PPH reporter on this issue. Maine Senator Angus King has publicly urged the USDA and US Trade Representative to fight EU efforts to protect the use of GI cheese names in cheese exported from the US.
Author Archives: Monroe Cheese Studio
Postcard From London
At the Neals Yard shoppe in Borough Market
It’s Coming! FSMA Decoded So Far…
During a salmonella outbreak of 2008 and 2009 nine people died, 166 were hospitalized and more than 700 fell ill. Authorities ultimately traced the contamination of Salmonella Typhimurium back to peanut products manufactured in a Texas plant owned by the Peanut Corporation of America. According to the US CDC an estimated 48 million people each year are affected by food borne illnesses resulting in over 100,000 hospitalization and 3,000 deaths. In this one case, however, there were several factors that caught the general public’s attention:
- Illnesses were caused all over the US without apparent patterns at first;
- People died from exposure in nursing homes and other medical facilities;
- Many different products across different company’s products and brands were found to be contaminated, both commercial and institutional;
- Ultimately the media found that the peanut processing plant had been operating legally in Texas without EVER having been inspected by state or federal food safety organizations.
As a result of the tremendous publicity and outrage of this embarrassing outbreak a White House Food Safety Working Group was formed to investigate this specific failure in the US food safety network. The result was the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) passed by Congress and to be implemented by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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