The great cheese conspiracy

In the early months of pregnancy a woman is given a huge list of food you are 'allowed' and 'not allowed' to eat.

Foods you MUST NOT EAT IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BECAUSE YOUR BABY WILL DIE!
include (but aren't limited to):

raw meats such as sushi, seafood especially shellfish, rare or uncooked beef or poultry (does any-one think eating raw chicken is a good idea?), raw eggs, foods containing raw egg such as Caesar dressing, mayonnaise, homemade ice cream or custard, unpasteurized eggnog or Hollandaise sauce, soft cheeses such as blue cheese, feta, goat cheese, brie, cambert, Latin-American soft white cheeses, blue-veined cheeses, caffeine, alcohol, fish that is high in mercury (presumably it's fine for every-one else?), deli meats including hot dogs, liver, artificial sweeteners and raw sprouts.

And for the first 2 or 3 months you follow this list like it was handed down to you on Mt Sinai written on stone tablets. Until one day you start to wonder how any-one ever managed to have a baby in the first place.

My problem is the cheese - and some times the smoked salmon but mainly the cheese. I love cheese! The softer, the gooier, the smellier the better. Give me a soft, blue vein cheese with a smell that makes your nasal passages bleed and I'm in heaven. Or a goat's cheese feta. Or a Camembert served with port soaked raisins. Ye gods I love cheese. Anyway.

So why? Why have I been denied this simple calcium rich pleasure? In times of trial and temptation I tried turning to cheddar and I'll admit, the sharp taste of a decent vintage did satisfy me for a while but it was just recreational use. My addiction requires soft, pungent, mouldy cheeses.

The answer to why these foods are on the forbidden list is simple - listeria. Listeria is a virus which won't generally harm a healthy adult but can cause severe illness, if not death, in an unborn baby. Soft cheeses are made in such a way that any bacteria from unpasteurized milk won't be killed in the manufacturing process so listeria has the opportunity to thrive.

bacteria from unpasteurized milk

bacteria from unpasteurized milk

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find unpasteurized milk in Australia? Or how hard it is to buy a product that has been made with unpasteurized milk? It's nearly impossible. I would have to go out to the country, find a cow, sexually harass it myself and then figure out how to make blue vein cheese before I had the slightest chance of ingesting a listeria filled dairy product.

European cheeses might, might carry more of a risk as (apparently) they tend to use more raw milk in the production of cheese. So I'm not eating Roquefort. There's plenty of very decent home grown cheeses to tide me over coming in packs with ingredient lists clearly saying "milk (pasteurized)".

Guess what I've been eating this weekend?

For more info, if you're interested, try this link and this other link. (There was another very funny article that I can't find now but I'll link to it if I ever do.)