Can I eat feta while pregnant?

The verdict

Pasteurised feta is safe to eat cold in the UK, Ireland and the United States. It is one of the few soft cheeses that the NHS names by name on its safe list, alongside cottage cheese, cream cheese, mozzarella, paneer, ricotta, mascarpone, halloumi and burrata.

Australia and New Zealand do not agree. Food Standards Australia New Zealand puts feta in its table of higher-risk foods for pregnant women, in the row covering soft, semi-soft and surface-ripened cheeses, next to brie, camembert, mozzarella, ricotta and blue. Its safer alternatives for that row are hard cheeses, pasteurised cream cheese, plain cottage cheese and baked soft cheeses cooked to an internal temperature of 75C.

So the same block of cheese gets a green light in a British supermarket and an amber one in an Australian one. Neither country is being careless; they have drawn the line in different places, and the section at the end of this page explains why.

Why feta is not brie

The reason the NHS separates feta from brie is the rind. Mould-ripened cheeses are ripened from the outside in by a surface mould, and that white coating is a living, low-acid, high-moisture surface that listeria can colonise. Feta has no rind at all. It is a brined curd cheese: salted, acidified and stored in its own salty whey.

Salt and acid both work against listeria. That does not make feta sterile, and listeria is famously able to grow at fridge temperatures, which is the whole reason cold ready-to-eat food is treated with care in pregnancy. But feta sits in a much less hospitable environment than the inside of a ripening camembert, and the NHS categorises it accordingly.

Pasteurisation is the other half of the answer. Almost all feta sold in UK, Irish and US supermarkets is made from pasteurised milk, and the packet will say so. The exception is cheese bought loose from a barrel at a deli counter or a market, where you cannot see the label and the counter itself is a handling risk.

How to check the packet

Look for the word pasteurised in the ingredients, usually written as pasteurised sheep's and goat's milk. Protected designation of origin feta must be Greek and must be made from sheep's milk with up to 30 per cent goat's milk, but the designation says nothing about pasteurisation, so you still need to read the label rather than assume.

Products sold as Greek-style salad cheese or white cheese are usually cow's milk and usually pasteurised, and are treated exactly the same way. Vegan feta made from coconut oil or cashews contains no dairy and is outside this advice entirely, though it is still a chilled ready-to-eat food and should be eaten within its use-by date.

Cooked feta is safe everywhere

Heat resolves the disagreement. Cooking kills listeria, which is why every authority that restricts a cheese also offers cooking as the way back in. FSANZ specifies baked soft cheeses cooked to an internal temperature of 75C. UK guidance uses the plainer test of cooked until steaming hot all the way through.

In practice that covers most of the ways feta is eaten hot. Baked feta pasta, where the block goes into the oven for half an hour, comfortably clears it. So does spanakopita, feta stirred through a hot traybake, feta on a pizza that comes out of the oven bubbling, and feta melted into a hot sauce.

What does not clear it is feta crumbled over a finished dish at the table, or scattered on a warm salad. Warming something through is not the same as cooking it. If you are following Australian or New Zealand advice, the feta needs to have been in the heat, not merely near it.

Greek salad, delis and buffets

The bigger practical risk with feta is rarely the cheese itself. It is how it is served. A Greek salad from a chilled counter, a mezze platter that has been out at room temperature, or a salad bar tub are all ready-to-eat chilled foods that have been handled, and UK guidance groups pre-packaged sandwiches and salads with the foods to be careful with for exactly that reason.

The Food Standards Agency's listeria advice is to keep chilled food below 5C, to eat ready-to-eat food within four hours of it leaving the fridge, or within two hours on a very warm day, and to always eat or freeze food by its use-by date. FSANZ makes the same point differently by telling people at higher risk to eat only freshly prepared food.

Applied to feta, that means a pre-packed tub you open at home is a better bet than an unrefrigerated deli platter, and a salad you make yourself is better than one that has been sitting under a buffet lamp.

If you have already eaten some

Pasteurised feta eaten cold is, on UK and Irish advice, simply not a problem, so there is nothing to do. Unpasteurised feta, or feta from a deli barrel of unknown provenance, is a very low risk rather than a high one. Listeriosis is rare.

The NHS position on any food that should have been avoided is that if you have had a small amount and did not become ill, it is unlikely to affect your baby. What matters is what happens next. Listeriosis can take a long time to show itself, and ACOG notes symptoms may appear as late as two months after eating contaminated food. Watch for fever, chills, muscle aches, headache, a stiff neck, confusion or diarrhoea, and contact your midwife or GP the same day if any of those appear. Say what you ate and when, because it changes what they test for.

Where guidance genuinely differs

The UK, Ireland and the US treat the risk as attaching to the cheese: no rind, pasteurised milk, therefore safe. The NHS puts feta on the safe list explicitly. ACOG's list of foods to avoid names feta only in the context of raw milk, and states that soft cheeses made with pasteurised milk are safe to eat.

Australia and New Zealand treat the risk as attaching to the category. FSANZ groups soft, semi-soft and surface-ripened cheeses together, whether pre-packaged or from a delicatessen, and asks vulnerable people to choose from the safer-alternatives column instead. Feta is named in that group, so the answer under Australian and New Zealand advice is to cook it or choose something else.

Ireland's HSE sits closer to the UK. Its list of foods to avoid names unpasteurised dairy, mould-ripened cheeses such as brie and camembert, and blue cheeses such as Danish blue, gorgonzola and roquefort. Feta is not on it.

If you are moving between these countries, or reading advice written for a different one, that is the whole of the disagreement. There is no hidden extra risk in British feta and no excess caution in Australian advice; the two systems classify the same cheese differently.