Unlike manufacturers of fruits, vegetables and meats, dairy producers have had few incidents of listeria outbreaks over the years, said Marianne Smukowski of the UW-Madison Center of Dairy Research. “And none have been traced back to aging cheese on wood boards,” she added.

Smukowski said she believes the FDA made its finding partly in response to the enactment of the Food Safety Modernization Act that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2011. The law shifts the focus from responding to contamination crises to preventing them and that can create overreactions from the FDA, she said.

“It’s a major overhaul of our food safety laws,” she said. “But things will pop up that they need to take a second look at and this might one of them.”

The FDA used two reports, published in 2010 and 2011 respectively, that said small amounts of the bacteria listeria monocytogenes could survive on wooden boards after they were cleaned and sanitized. But another report, written for the UW-Madison Center for Dairy Research that was published last year, disagreed with those findings and used one of the reports used in the FDA report for its conclusion.