Food safety regulations developed by the EU – can anything good come of those? Extremely complex, yes. Easier for the big rich players stocking supermarkets worldwide with to comply with, for sure: They would have the staff to deal with both the practical implications of the various checkpoints and procedures, and with filing all those forms!
The incidence of food-borne diseases (salmonella, hepatitis etc) in Umbria has gone down since the latest set of EU food safety regulations came into force in 1997. That’s good! And the food science and safety research institute we visited in Orvieto – called CERCAL – is there to support the small guys that don’t have staff that can just dedicate themselves to the safety procedures and filling in forms… The process is different, and the food safety requirements can be different and tailor-made when the producer/processor is a small or medium-sized enterprise. The supply chain often is really short, and the food doesn't have to last for months on a supermarket shelf or while shipped to the other side of the world, anyway (and it tastes great!).
So, to make all this real: Lets look at mozzarella di bufala. This is just one example of all the fantastic traditional foods made in Italy – and all over Europe for that matter – that people really feared would be forbidden under EU rules. In principle, all dairy products sold in the EU should be based on pasteurized milk (to kill listeria and all sorts of other ugly bacteria). However, that kind of mozzarella doesn’t taste like anything. CERCAL brought the scientific rigor to prove that the traditional process for making mozzarella di bufala, in which boiling water is added for 15 minutes at one point, actually kills as many or more bacteria than the pasteurization process, and leads to at least as safe a product. So there's hope for the small producers if in the end the thing that really matters is the safety of the food, not how you get there…
Malena
Malena
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