Swiss cheesemakers kept hold of one of their production tools recently. On April 2, the Federal Administrative Court of Switzerland ruled that makers of Emmentaler cheese — the traditional Swiss cheese with holes — can add small amounts of hayflower powder to each batch. Without it, in recent years, the distinctive holes had been disappearing.

How can this be, and why does hayflower powder have to be added to make holes? Until the 20th century, all cows were of course milked by hand in barns. Raw cheese was mixed with natural rennet, and a specific type of bacteria, Propionibacterium, was present to convert lactic acid into propionic acid, acetic acid, and CO₂ gas, which forms the eyes of the cheese. These days the milk is pasteurized, which means that the Propionibacterium die, and starter cultures have to be added.

Still, until recently, the cheese had holes. What changed is that most dairies today use automatic milking systems instead of open buckets in a barn. Milk thus goes straight from teat to tube. It’s cleaner — but ultimately too clean. Turns out that the hay dust (and manure dust, perhaps?) from the barn provided nucleation sites for CO₂ bubbles to begin to form. Adding in hay-flower powder — hay dust — is necessary in today’s industrial system, or else the Swiss cheese would have no holes.

This has the ring of a modern Aesop’s fable. But does it really matter that these seemingly artificial means are being used to produce commercially viable quantities of Emmentaler? Are compromises like this inevitable? Is the flavor profile as complex as it was pre-pasteurization and pre-machine-milking? Is human health demonstrably better due to pasteurization and the elimination of environmental contaminants from the barn? Is this just a slippery slope to further adulteration of an ancient and pure product? 

These are all good questions to ask, and there are no simple answers. This is why we need a well-educated, free, healthy people — to be able to intelligently and civilly debate the tradeoffs inherent in any food legislation (including whether government power and resources should be put behind protecting a special interest like this).

We Americans aren’t immune from making food and farm policy decisions that over time make less and less sense. Food safety laws from the early 1900s addressed some real risks to human health and animal welfare, but they made it difficult to purchase healthy, more natural products like raw milk or locally grown meat. Crop insurance protects farmers from the fickleness of market swings, but it also introduces significant moral hazards and has entrenched some practices that have depleted soil health. It doesn’t always even take government influence — to produce some crops we apply fertilizer and plant growth regulators at practically the same time, effectively driving with our feet on both the gas and the brake. 

In other words, cleaning up one problem almost always leads to others. As the Swiss have discovered, cleanliness is not next to holey-ness.

And that’s the view from the country.