Why Artisan Cheesemakers Said "No Whey" to the FDA's Wooden-Board Ban

The artisan cheese industry lost its shit after the Food and Drug Administration said it would ban the use of wooden boards for aging craft cheese. So much so in fact, the FDA has since walked back its position—good news for anyone that doesn't want to get stuck with plasticy tasting processed cheese slices from now on.

Why such outrage? Thing is, in addition to possibly containing harmful bacteria like Listeria monocytogenes that can be lethal to humans, wood is vital to the process of making specialty cheese. Artisans claim that banning wood boards would mean that the unprocessed Parmesan, Gouda, brie, cheddar, and Gruyère that we’ve grown to love would be impractical or even impossible to make.

“There is a certain dimensionality and layers to the flavor,” Nora Weiser executive director of the American Cheese Society told me over the phone, “This is why people have made it this way for thousands of years.”

Aging specialty ripened cheeses on wooden shelves essentially puts the finishing touch on the product after the milk is curdled and poured into molds. The aging process, known as “ripening” in the industry, involves controlling humidity and temperature to manipulate the breakdown of fats and proteins and produce the "good" bacteria that gives the cheese its flavor, texture, and smell.

It's a process that dates back centuries. “I don’t think we could do it without the wood,” Andy Hatch of the nationally celebrated Uplands Cheese company explained. “It harbors the organisms that you want to encourage—organisms that help form the rind.”

These microbes add flavor and uniqueness to aged cheese. Ripening is influenced by the interaction of bacteria, enzymes, and the physical conditions of the room the cheese is in; the speed of the reactions is determined by temperature and humidity, helping control the moisture in the cheese that forms the rind.

Wooden shelving is especially suited for creating a microenvironment for these microorganisms to thrive in. The FDA is totally right: microbes live in the boards—but they're supposed to live in the boards. The wood facilitates the interaction of the bacteria and enzymes, which vary depending on the type of cheese being produced due to the inputs, which are the milk, rennet, and fermenting microorganisms applied during curdling.

The type of wood itself doesn’t influence the flavor, but it's important to use loose grained wood, cheesemakers told me—softwood like spruce, pine, or cedar—because they will more easily accept and release humidity, which affects how flavors are created. Hardwoods like oak would not be a suitable microenvironment for delicious cheese.

Without the use of wood, the majority of aged specialty cheeses just wouldn’t be possible to make, Hatch said. Most American cheeses—which is to say, artisan cheeses made in America—and many European imports are ripened on wooden boards.

The problem is, the same characteristics of the natural material makes it hard to keep clean and sanitary. “The porous structure of wood enables it to absorb and retain bacteria, therefore bacteria generally colonize not only the surface but also the inside layers of wood," the FDA originally wrote to explain the reasoning behind the ban. "The shelves or boards used for aging make direct contact with finished products; hence they could be a potential source of pathogenic microorganisms in the finished products.”

If the food safety agency does wind up cracking down on the use of wooden boards to ripen cheese, we may be stuck eating Kraft singles and other processed cheeses instead nibbling the refined rinds of America's fledgling artisanal cheese sector. But the FDA has since said that’s not the plan, at least for now.

“To be clear, we have not and are not prohibiting or banning the long-standing practice of using wood shelving in artisanal cheese,” wrote the FDA in statement on its website Wednesday. “Nor does the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) require any such action. Reports to the contrary are not accurate.”