On a related tangent, Twitter has no room for an altercation, so I’ll respond here to the follower who challenged my Tweet about the grimness of a cheesemaker shutting down after an E. coli outbreak while the scum who foisted half a billion possibly contaminated eggs on the country is probably getting richer than ever. My consort, for once, got it right away: It’s like what happened to Martha Stewart — she went to jail for a set-up while banksters guilty of worse offenses walk free to this day. The system is rigged. But that’s the big picture. The small one, to answer the question “Artisanal E. coli is OK?”: No E. coli is ever okay. But the reach of a tiny producer is much more limited. Eight people in four states were sickened by the cheese. Contrast that with only the salmonella from the Schwann’s ice cream truck that laid low 740 people in 30 states. All that said, though: I have never seen an artisanal cheesemaker in Italy doing what was described in the FDA’s complaint. Even on the most isolated farm high on a mountain in Piemonte, sterility ruled. Amazing to consider anything-goes Italy has more rigid standards. Then again, anyone who’s seen “Food, Inc.” knows why the shit gets in the American milk to begin with . . .