Totally Bummed

Is anything worse than knowing Nirvana, and then having it taken away?

Such is the dilemma that we - lovers of Greece's thick, creamy "Total" brand yogurt - find ourselves in with the latest move by the US Food and Drug Administration:

Fage Total Greek Yogurt had to stop sales after the US Food and Drug Administration discovered that the company did not have proper certification for interstate sales, according to Antonios Maridakis, general manager of Fage USA. "It has nothing to do with the product," Maridakis said in a phone interview from Athens. "This is not a quality issue."

During a promotion at Whole Foods Market, Maridakis said, a competitor notified the FDA that Fage was not on the agency's list of authorized interstate milk shippers, a designation that requires certification of a dairy producer's sanitation processes. As a result, Fage, which started selling in the United States in 2000, is losing $500,000 a week in business here while it attempts to convince any state where it does business to send inspectors to Greece.

What is it with the FDA and dairy products? I'm particularly disappointed that I can't get a hold of some of the gorgeous unpasteurized cheeses that hale from Italy, France and Spain.

Then again, according to the Los Angeles Times' David Shaw, dairy isn't in the spotlight alone. Apparently, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has it in for saucisson and duck:

Unlike a chef friend of mine who used to smuggle in ortolans (tiny, delectable French birds) packed amid his wife's underwear, we were completely open and aboveboard...We figured that if anything were confiscated, we wouldn't protest. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Much to my surprise and delight, the inspector said the only items we couldn't bring in were those she broadly characterized as "meat"