At first blush, it would seem as if outlawing a certain type of cheese in Wisconsin would be like banning giant hats in Vatican City. The Dairy State currently makes more cheese than any state in the nation, providing one-quarter of the country's cheese supply.

But recent uncertainty by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is causing one artisanal cheesemaker in western Wisconsin to halt production of one of his farm's signature cheeses. Andy Hatch, owner of Uplands Cheese, announced in August that he wouldn't be producing this fall's run of Rush Creek Reserve, a soft cheese popular during the holidays.

"Food safety officials have been unpredictable, at best, in their recent treatment of soft, raw-milk cheeses, and until our industry is given clear and consistent guidance, we are forced to stop making these cheeses," Hatch wrote in an email to fellow cheesemongers and distributors in late August. This uncertainty has forced Hatch to halt production of his signature cheese, as he doesn't want to begin aging his product only to have it outlawed at the whim of the FDA months later.

In an Aug. 29 letter to the American Cheese Society, the FDA announced that it would be changing its testing protocol for non-pathogenic bacteria in cheese and admitted that it had made some mistakes in its raw milk cheese testing procedures. But according to Hatch, "It's really not a meaningful enough shift to change the way I'm thinking about the regulatory climate."

The FDA letter "just serves to reinforce the impression that I have that this is not especially organized and not well thought-out," Hatch told me. "The fact that they're changing horses midstream again only adds to the impression that we don't know what to expect next," he said.

It appears that not only is the FDA behind the times, it might be lagging the science of raw milk cheese by centuries. People have been making cheese from unpasteurized milk for many hundreds of years.

The FDA's current rule, in place since 1949, mandates that cheese containing raw milk has to be aged for 60 days. But according to Hatch, the FDA has since discovered that the 60-day requirement is not the proper way to regulate cheese containing raw milk. For instance, now we know certain pathogens can survive for more than 60 days, which is why the FDA has been scrambling to write new rules.

But Hatch has never gotten a single report of anyone getting sick from any of his cheeses. "We test every batch of cheese that leaves this building, and our cheese has always tested fine," he said. Hatch points out that the decision to halt Rush Creek Reserve wasn't based on a problem at their farm; it was because of the FDA's ability "to move the goal posts without warning."

Instead of a capricious age limit, Hatch suggests batch testing as the new standard. He supports "testing the product itself, proving it's uncontaminated and using that as the basis."

Part of the problem is that the public often conflates fluid raw milk with raw milk cheese, which is a completely different product. For one, fluid raw milk is regulated on the state level, while cheese is regulated by the FDA. Cheese-making is meant to preserve milk in a safe way — it has a number of safeguards in the process that fluid raw milk doesn't have. Plus, there's time to test cheese, whereas milk needs to be consumed fresh.

It's also not as though consumers don't know what they are buying. Given the cost of the cheese (I paid nearly $10 for a small slice to sample — it is delicious), it's not as though people are going to be accidentally buying it and putting it on burgers. (At my local grocery store, a whole wheel of the company's Pleasant Ridge Reserve is $263.80, which is more than I've paid for four wheels on my car.)

Hatch pays attention to politics "quite a bit," and politicians from both sides have reached out to him on this issue – U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson all have contacted him to help. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke has toured his farm, and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has been using him to demonstrate the hazards of regulatory overreach.

But Hatch says that he's not against regulation; he just wants the rules to be clear and predictable in how they are enforced. "Having a safe, well-regulated food industry is part of what makes us a first-world country," he said, adding that as long as the new rules are science-based and recognize that raw milk cheese can be made safely, "I'll be OK with that."

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger. Email cschneider@jrn.com. Twitter: @Schneider_CM