Tag Archives: Regulation

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Maine Supreme Court Rules On Dairy Licensing Question

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The Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued a ruling against Dan Brown (aka “Farmer Brown” in Blue Hill), upholding a lower court’s decision that he had broken the law by selling raw milk from his unlicensed, un-inspected Gravelwood Farm. Here is the link to read the BDN story.

This ruling lifted Mr. Brown’s crusade to the national spotlight with a recent New York Times article covering the history and outcome of his, and the supporters of municipal “Food Sovereignty” ordinances, fight against state regulation.

Did the FDA just ban European cheese?

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After “clarifying” it’s position on using wood boards to age cheese by saying that wood can NOT be used to safely produce aged cheese, the U.S. FDA moved to dampen fears it will ban all cheese aged on wood.

Meanwhile the American Cheese Society has issued its response to the FDA’s “clarification” on using wood in aging caves and is working to get more information from the FDA on what evidence for their clarification was used, and help them get more information about the issue that may help them see that wood has been used to safely age trillions of pounds of cheese over the last 10,000 years.

UPDATE 16 June 2014:
Based on a unanimous vote at our June 2014 Maine Cheese Guild meeting, the membership of the MCG publicly supports the American Cheese Society’s position statement on the safety of aging cheese on wood, as well as the work of ACS to maintain open lines of communication with the FDA and other governmental regulatory agencies.

LD1786 “Died” in ME House and Senate?

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May 10th: I have heard reports that LD1786, An Act To Allow the Sale of Unregulated Farm-produced Dairy Products at the Site of Production, has “died” in the legislature. However due to the completely opaque and asynchronous nature of the Maine Legislature’s bill tracking web tool and that nothing appears to have been reported on it’s status in the press it is difficult to tell exactly what happened and when. When I have found something definitive regarding its status, I’ll update that in this space. If you have links to official information regarding the bill’s status, please post a comment with that link.