Yes, Type 'S' lime, manufactured and sold as a mortar reinforcer, but what it really is is partially slaked quicklime.
As far as health inspection...
In the good old State of Indiana, regulations are wonderfully loose. And Howard county inspection is all but non existent.
For example, recently in the nearby city of Kokomo we fixed up a small stand that is used as one of those drive through drink deals (drive through diabetes). It was built up on a parking lot, and so had no way of handling drainage very well. So as a result, the bottom was rotting away. So inside the bottoms of the studs and sheathing were full of rot fungus, and the bottom 2 feet of wall was colonized with good old black mold (yum).
Most places in the US would have declared this place unfit, and destroyed it. But good old Indiana laid-back policy means we could repair it instead. So the solution? We replaced the entire bottom 3 feet or so of the structure. When the city inspector came by, who is both building and health inspector, we more or less told him what we did and he said it was good. He's a great guy, we needed to move a gigantic ice machine out of our way, so he took me down underneath the city building to pick up a tool do lift and move very heavy things.
But that said, I still do want to make things to meet and exceed the standards.
The cheese that is being processed is whey cultured and raw milk. While there are no explicitly stricter requirements regarding sanitation for this I want to have a very sanitary environment for the purposes of quality control.
Cheese is cultured by bacteria, yeast, and molds. They will define its flavor. If unwanted bacteria gets into the mix, it may not be harmful to your health but it will harm the quality of your cheese.
Furthermore, my culturing method is to follow the traditional practice of holding over whey from the previous batch to introduce bacteria into the next batch. This means that if a batch is ruined by contamination, so is my culture. So you see how very important sanitation is. This method is a lot riskier than using packaged starter cultures, but it results in a richer, better and more complex cheese.
