The Raw Milk Cheese Recall Every Fridge Should Pass

Check your cheese drawer tonight. A raw milk cheese sold at retailers across the country and online has been tied to a multistate E. coli outbreak, and the resulting raw milk cheese recall covers every package on the market. Thirteen people in nine states have fallen ill, eight were hospitalized, and three developed a severe kidney complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome, according to the New York Post's report on the FDA's outbreak update. No deaths have been reported. More than half of those sickened are children five years old or younger.

The recall covers all Sierra Nevada Graziers grass-fed raw milk cheeses: medium cheddar, sharp cheddar, jalapeño jack, and Monterey jack. The cheeses were sold in eight-ounce and sixteen-ounce packages at retail, and in five-pound loaves to restaurants, food-service companies, and wholesalers. Sierra Nevada Cheese Co., based in Willows, California, has been making cheese, butter, yogurt, and cream cheese since nineteen ninety-seven, according to the New York Post.

In a statement posted to social media, the company said the illnesses appear connected to its medium cheddar, but that it is pulling every Graziers raw milk cheese because investigators have not narrowed the contamination to one lot or date code, according to reporting by the Marler Blog. There are no lot codes to check here. If the label says Graziers raw milk cheese, it is part of the recall.

How investigators traced the outbreak to the cheese

Health officials interviewed nine of the people who got sick, and all nine said they had eaten Sierra Nevada Graziers raw milk cheese in the week before their symptoms started. That detail matters because, according to the CDC's FoodNet survey, only about five percent of Americans eat raw milk cheese in any given week. Whole genome sequencing then showed the bacteria from the patients were closely related, pointing to a single shared source, according to the Marler Blog's summary of the investigation. The patients range in age from one to fifty-eight, with a median age of five, and more than six in ten are female.

The timeline is part of the problem. The first illness began in early July, and the FDA did not contact Sierra Nevada Cheese Company until September twenty-fourth, more than eleven weeks later. The company agreed to the recall that same day at the FDA's recommendation. The CDC says the true number of people sickened is probably higher than thirteen, because many cases never get tested and it usually takes weeks to connect an illness to an outbreak. The FDA's investigation into how the contamination happened, and whether other products are affected, is still open.

What to do with the cheese in your fridge

The FDA's advice is blunt: "Do not eat, sell, or serve recalled Sierra Nevada Graziers grass-fed raw milk cheeses," the agency said. Return the cheese to the store for a refund, or throw it away. A recall this broad is unusual: with no lot codes to check, this raw milk cheese recall puts the burden on shoppers to read the label.

Cheese makes a recall like this harder than most, because it keeps for weeks in the refrigerator and freezes well, which means a package bought in early summer could still be sitting in someone's freezer right now, according to The Sun Post's summary of the FDA advisory. If you moved the cheese out of its original packaging and cannot tell whether it is part of the recall, federal officials say to discard it. Wash anything the cheese touched with hot, soapy water, or run it through the dishwasher.

The five-pound food-service loaves add another wrinkle. Cheese sold in bulk to restaurants and delis gets cut, re-wrapped, and sold under a store's own label, and the FDA has told retailers not to sell repackaged Graziers cheese, according to the Marler Blog. So if you bought cut raw milk cheddar or jack from a deli counter or cheese case this summer and cannot trace where it came from, throw it out. The nine states reporting cases are where the patients live, not necessarily where they bought the cheese, since it was distributed nationwide and sold online.

Raw milk cheese keeps landing in recalls

This is the second raw-milk cheese scare tied to a California company this year. Back in March, a different company's raw cheddar was recalled after a similar E. coli outbreak, one that also hit mostly young children, according to the New York Post. Raw milk cheese is legal to sell in the United States as long as it is aged at least sixty days, and the sharp cheddar in this recall was aged over one hundred twenty days, according to its label. That aging rule is the legal minimum; it does not guarantee that harmful bacteria are gone, according to the Marler Blog's analysis of the outbreak.

The pattern is worth remembering: cheese has a long shelf life, the investigation clock runs slow, and by the time a recall lands, the product has often been sitting in kitchens for weeks. The FDA says it will update its advisory as the investigation continues. If you want more on how the food around us affects our health, we recently covered what a new study found about ultra-processed food and mood, and the newstalgia wave remixing childhood snacks this year.