Another hurdle for Mat-Su dairy venture

For most of us, saying “cheese” naturally elicits a smile.

For folks at the fledgling Matanuska Creamery, smiles over its first production of cheddar await results of continued state testing. About 40,000 pounds of cheese sit and age while the Alaska Division of Environmental Health continues to test. And as it ages, the prospect of about $72,000 in unrealized income for local farmers becomes more of a sharp possibility.

It’s another hurdle the Valley-based creamery may have to clear in what has been a busy year for the enterprise. The creamery was pushed into service quickly following the December 2007 shutdown of state-run Matanuska Maid Dairy, which left Alaska dairy farmers out to pasture without a market for their milk.

As Matanuska Creamery hustled to accept local milk, its first product was the cheese, which went into production in late March. Since then, those who bought thousands of dollars’ worth of cheese futures based on that production are enjoying the creamery’s cheddar produced with pasteurized milk. The problem, the state says, is with its first run, which was produced with unpasteurized milk.

The Division of Environmental Health says it has detected the presence of listeria bacteria in some samples of the cheese. Karen Olson, a part-owner in Matanuska Creamery, says samples of the same cheese sent to a trio of reputable testing facilities in the Lower 48 give the local cheese a thumbs up.

But it’s the thumb of the state of Alaska that counts.

The state says it tests according to guidelines set by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Food safety must be the No. 1 priority for both agencies, and we agree with this. At the same time, we wonder if the state laboratory, unaccustomed to cheese testing, may have its own learning curve challenges, as well as those at the dairy.

High-quality cheese using unpasteurized milk is produced and consumed all over the globe, and while the creamery is now making cheese with pasteurized milk, having to eat $72,000 worth of lost income won’t be easy for Alaska’s dairy farmers, who struggle to keep their operations alive. And for Matanuska Creamery, the loss of 40,000 pounds of cheese, even at a modest multiplier of $10 a pound, is a whopping business loss of $400,000.

We would never advocate state inspectors approve any product for sale they deem to be unsafe, but no food product can ever be guaranteed 100 percent safe.

Faced with the prospect of having to destroy and dispose of 20 tons of cheese, it’s understandable Matanuska Creamery would work to pursue another outcome. State officials say only their test counts, however, which means this may be the fate of Matanuska Creamery’s first product.

We don’t pretend to be experts in determining the safety of food products, including cheese. But we believe the system should not be so inflexible as to ignore evidence that three other independent, reputable labs associated with the cheese-making industry have tested the local cheese as being OK.