These laws are not about protecting the consumer from inauthentic products. They're about protecting producers from competition. Exclusive ownership of famous culinary names like "Feta" and "Champagne" is valuable, and local producers throughout the EU want that edge and lobby to obtain it. Benefiting certain producers in this manner may be something that's worthwhile doing, but we should at least be honest about what the real goal of the policy is.
Yes, they are, and I have no problem with that. When I buy "Comté", I want the money to go in the region where my grandparents were born and raised, where we spent lots of vacations visiting museum, caves and enjoying the local cheese. I don't want some kind of global industry stealing the name "Comté" to help sell a knockoff. These days Comté is not my favorite cheese, I have a soft sport for Italian cheeses and discovered recently some Eastern European ones that are delicious. But when I want Comté, I want Comté, made in Jura, by Montbéliardes cows. If they don't respect this, it's not Comté.
In this country, we have long made a product called "Cheddar Cheese". Unfortunately, cheddar is not covered by Protected Designation of Origin rules. So most of the cheddar in the shops is imported.
Real cheddar is now pretty hard to find. In my youth, I lived for a while in cheddar country; there was a cheese shop on the corner that sold the most amazing, nutty, crumbly cheddar. It's decades since I've eaten anything like it; even premium cheddar from top-class cheese shops doesn't match it (few Americans have ever eaten cheese like that).
That is: the competition from industrial cheese-makers has forced out the traditional makers, driven down the quality of the cheddar that's on the market, and made it much harder to find proper cheddar. The good stuff can only be found in specialist cheese shops, and even that is a shadow of what it used to be.
I approve of Protected Designation of Origin. More generally, I approve of regulated food labelling (GMOs? Growth-hormone beef? How can I exercise my market-power as a consumer, if I'm not allowed to know what's in the pack?)
The other that I really like looks a bit like this: http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0250/1387/8893/products/Arr... but I think that it's younger than the one here.
I have no doubts that the local ones are probably way better, but I still haven't taken the time to visit Eastern/Central Europe.
There are both un-smoked and smoked variants, different shapes etc. I think the traditional is the braided one. Definitely recommended if you ever visit Orava/Tatras.
If this is due to generally lower standards, or actually because of the differences in milk and/or bacterial cultures, I couldn’t possibly comment. But it is noticeable.
However, it's become a staple through massive production of something quite different.
I imagine a lot of it has to do with inputs, there has been a race to the bottom for milk prices which means both breeds and feed compromise on taste for volume, all milk is pasteurized, minimal aging is done in massive blocks, etc.
This is absolutely not true, at least in countries I've lived.
Do I believe that someone in the USA is capable of producing very good feta? Absolutely! And I've had some. However, the vast majority of what you will find in the typical grocery stores isn't very good, majority of it notably inferior not only to the imports, but random stuff I've bought in, say, Greece or Israel etc. [edit for clarity]
I'd be all for something a bit less restrictive, but anything goes approach just leads to a glut of low quality approximations riding on the cachet of the name until the name becomes meaningless. You can argue that this gives consumer choice (i.e. I'd rather pay $2 for feta then $5) but it doesn't give accurate information, which is also bad.
More generally, I can understand consumer protections that focus on the nature of the product itself, but where the product comes from is irrelevant. If the goal were simply to make sure that Feta always tastes like "authentic" Feta, then the regulations would focus on ingredients, process and the final product. But regulations about where the product is produced exist because producers want to exclude competition. Lawmakers do, of course, argue that they're just trying to protect consumers, because that's what they have to do in order to justify the policy, but the goal is obviously to help Greek cheese-makers, French viniculturalists, etc.
My point stands, there is a huge gulf in the US and Canada, UK (smaller experience with local feta there but it wasn’t good) etc. I wouldn’t support a GI limited to Greece , edited to clear that up.
I suspect we are making compatible points - you that other countries exist that make good feta by default (true!) - me that countries exist where the default is not good (at least to my taste) and definitely distinguishable from the former category (also true).
I guess feta is a good example of the problem of defining these things by region not process. I feel pretty confident that "feta" shouldn't belong to any one country in the region with a tradition of making it; on the other hand differentiating it from cheap knock offs also makes sense to me.
The PDO for feta protects a cheese made in Greece that's traditionally called feta. Other countries around the Mediterrannean and in Eastern Europe make similar (but not identical) cheeses but they call it by different names, for example Sirene in Romania (which is made with cow's milk rather than sheep and goat's milk as in Greece).
I don't think it makes sense to mix up the protection for feta with protections for sirene, for example. Sirene should be protected by a PDO specific to its own make, ingredients and characteristics.
Just because lots of cheeses around the area look similar to feta, doesn't mean we can just lump them all together with feta. Otherwise, why not lump Roquefort together with Gorgonzola and Stilton? They're all blue cheeses made in Europe, after all.
I would have no problem with a definition of "feta" that focused on things like the ingredients, process or qualities of the resulting cheese. Those are the sorts of things that a law intended to protect consumers would focus on. Instead, the EU defines "feta" by region (with some ingredient and process requirements as well), which is simply an attempt to benefit producers. I just want a bit of honesty about what these sorts of laws are intended to achieve.
In my opinion, the "feta" geographical indication is a particularly absurd case, since "feta" is just the modern Greek name for a type of cheese that's been produced throughout the Balkans and in Turkey since time immemorial. Greek cheese-makers are lucky that their name for the cheese became international (as opposed, say, to the Serbo-Croat name for the cheese), and now they're cashing in on it.
And my point is that this is not true; that they are both, and it's important. So I guess we are disagreeing after all :)
I think a non-region tied version of this would be great, but "anything goes" is probably worse than current state.
Of course any sensible discussion about the producer protection side has to look at duties and quotas too, which makes things more complicated.
The "problem" is that typically when there is a strong food brand, it also has a strong geographic association, and so TSG is available only for lesser brands.
Can you see a world where consumers and producers are not in opposition, and actually have some alignment of interests?
I need to be able to tell the difference tho. My interest seem to be aligned with the producers.
This is not true and you don't know things as well as you think you do. PDO regulations absolutely focus precisely on ingredients, process and the final product.
For example, PDO regulations for feta stipulate, among other details, that it must be made with sheep's milk with the addition of up to 30% goat's milk and that the milk must come from animals born and bred in the Greek regions of Thessaly, Thrace, Epirus, Macedonia, Central Greece, Peloponse and Lesvos, from the breeds adapted to the area and reared by traditional methods. The fat content of the milk must be at least 6% w/w and the pH of the milk before the cheese is made must be at least 6.5. The milk must be made into cheese at most 48 hours after milking. The finished cheese must be aged for at least two months in brine containing 7% NaCl w/w. The final product must be a cheese "distinguished by its slightly acid and salty taste and its properties of mild lipolysis" (lipolysis imparts a piquant taste to cheese), with a maximum water content of 58%, minimum fat content of 43%, and 2% salt in water. There are more detailed instructions here:
https://ec.europa.eu/geographical-indications-register/eambr...
So the PDO regulates the provenance of the sheep milk, as well as the location the cheese is manufactured, but obviously the focus is on the quality and organoleptic characterisics of the ingredients in the specified territories, and that because the same characteristics are not reproducible in different territories (for example because the breeds of milk producing animals are different and the flora they feed on, and therefore the soil bacteria that flavour this flora, are different).
I also note that most "feta" cheese made outside Greece is actually made with cow's milk. For example, this was the case with French, German and Danish "feta" before Greece successfully defended its PDO and it is still the case today for feta made in the US. I'm not sure about Australia, but it's probably the same there. In Greece, cheese made in the same way as feta but with cow's milk is called "telemes" and is also a PDO cheese.
As far as I can tell, no "feta" cheese made outside Greece has the piquant taste imparted to cheese milk by lipases, that characterises Greek feta.
Lots of food types that are not geographic indications have strict requirements on ingredients, process, finished product.
The geographic restriction for "feta" serves no purpose except to favor the producers who lobbied for the geographic indication. You could strip off the geographic restriction, and you'd have a normal food quality regulation.
> I also note that most "feta" cheese made outside Greece is actually made with cow's milk.
Feta cheese has been made throughout the Eastern Mediterranean for ages, primarily using sheep's and goat's milk. There's nothing particularly special or distinctive or uniform about Greek feta. The historical reason why the geographic indication is limited to Greece is that it was created by the Greek government (i.e., it was a protectionist measure passed by the government to benefit its own cheese-makers). Greece then lobbied the EU to adopt the geographic indication. That's why the PDO is limited to Greece - not because what the Greeks call "feta" is different from cheeses produced in the same way right across the border in Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria or Turkey.
So you insist, but it's clear to me you do this without any substantial knowledge of feta, or the similar cheeses made around the area, other than what a quick googe could tell you.
In truth, it takes rather more than a quick google to realise that what you say is wrong. The other cheeses that are similar to feta and made in the Balkans, Turkey, Romania, etc, are almost always made primarily with cow's milk, sometimes with added goat's milk. Why? Because cow's milk is cheaper. Why? Because cows produce a lot more milk than sheep. Individual cows produce double or triple the amount of milk of individual sheep and cows can be milked all year round whereas sheep are only milked between February and September.
Even in Greece, non-PDO cheeses made in the style of feta (or other PDO cheeses like kasseri) are made with cow's milk, again because it's cheaper because it's more plentiful. More precisely, those non-PDO cow's milk cheeses made in Greece with cow's milk are made with cow's milk imported from nearby countries that have substantially larger dairy cow herds than Greece.
Greeks make most of their cheeses with sheep and goat's milk (pretty much every single Greek PDO cheese is a sheep and goat's milk cheese, except for Metsovone, St. Michali, Kopanisti and Graviera Naxou and the latter two can also be made with sheep and goat's milk). This is actually a very stringent restriction and it gives an easy advantage on price and profitabilty to cheeses made with cow's milk, which is why the most common adulteration of Greek PDO cheeses is with cow's milk imported from Bulgaria, Turkey, etc.
So basically what you say is completely wrong. Greeks are forced to make their cheeses according to the PDO regulations. Everyone else is free to make theirs any old way they want. That's why Greek feta is different than other cheeses in the region. It's the market forces.
You keep making assumptions based on incomplete knowledge of the cheese market and then you state these assumptions with great certainty, even though they are completely wrong. Please don't do that, that's just spreading misinformation.
That's not true, because most feta produced outside Greece is made with cow's milk, rather than sheep and goat's milk. In Greece it's made with sheep and goat's milk.
Why does that make any difference? First, because cow's milk is relatively tasteless compared to sheep and goat's milk. Goat's milk in particular has a strong "gamey" flavour and sheep's milk is also "heavier" than cow's milk.
Sheep's milk also has a different composition than cow's milk. Depending on breeds and season, sheep's milk has almost double the amount of fats and proteins (caseins and whey proteins) than cow's milk (and also goat's milk, which is about the same as cow's milk in composition).
More importantly, feta made with sheep and goat's milk has a piquant taste imparted by the lipolysis that is the result of lipases found particularly in goat's milk. Although to be fair, lipases are nowadays added to cheese milk as an additive, because they are destroyed by pasteurisation (and most Greek cheeses are not made with raw milk). However in practice lipases are never added to cow's milk "feta" possibly because consumers used to cow's milk "feta" don't expect it to be spicy-hot, as real feta should be.
There's also various other organoleptic characteristics that distinguish sheep and goat's milk cheeses from cow's milk, for example the firmness of the paste - more elastic in cow's milk cheeses, more crumbly in sheep and goat's cheeses. etc. etc.
tl;dr, yes, you can absolutely tell the difference between Greek feta and "feta" from outside Greece, provided you know what Greek feta tastes like. Which I think you probably don't. I think you're just assuming that it must all be a big bunch of lies to sell cheese that's just the same as any cheese.
Well, it's not.
It sounds like what you're most worried about is Northern European producers using cow's milk, but there are producers throughout the Eastern Mediterranean using sheep's and goat's milk.
Cheese made across the border from Epirus in Albania (careful: the Greek-speaking Orthodox minority in Albania are Northern Epirotes, not "Greek Albanians") may be very similar, but it's not called "feta" in Albanian. I don't know what it's called to be honest, but "feta" is the name traditionally used by Greeks. So in this case it wouldn't make sense to call it "feta" even if it has a similar character to feta. Which, to be honest, I don't know because I haven't tasted that cheese.
Anyway the point is that you can tell feta apart from ""Feta-like" cheese produced in any number of places around the world", contrary to what you said.
And in any case, it seems to me very likely that before reading my comment you didn't realise that feta is not made with cow's milk, as most people don't, so I think you should concede that your original comment was made given incomplete information.
That depends on which cheese we're talking about. There's enough variation between different Greek fetas that lumping then all into one group and excluding other closely related cheeses does not make sense, from a purely culinary point of view.
> Cheese made across the border from Epirus in Albania ... may be very similar, but it's not called "feta" in Albanian.
And that's the point. The distinction is purely national and linguistic. White briny cheese made with goat's and sheep's milk in Epirus and southern Albania are not treated differently by the EU because of intrinsic differences between the cheeses. They're treated differently because the Greek government was able to successfully lobby for a geographical indication that excludes cheeses produced outside its borders.
"Lobbied"! Seriously.
"Culinary point of view"? Give me a break. You haven't even tried Greek feta, let alone all those other cheeses...
I simply think it's a bit absurd to try to claw back a generic food name, simply because it originated in one country. I can at least sympathize with Champagne as a geographic indication, since there is a region with that name, but "feta" is just a Greek word (borrowed from Italian) that's become international thanks to the Greek diaspora.
And you haven't eaten all those "identical cheeses" or you'd know they're not identical. Although I suppose you may just have a very poor sense of taste.
Edit: No, really, I straight up don't believe you that you've tried different cheeses around the Balkans. Maybe you tried one or two, but not the way you make it sound, like you tasted a great variety and found them all the same. First because that's absurd -even if all those cheeses were similar in taste they wouldn't be identical, because that's not how cheese works. And second because you've already made up a whole bunch of stuff in this conversation, like all that nonsense about lobbying. You're clearly trying to "wing" it. So I don't believe what you say.
However, I have had feta cheese in the Balkans outside of Greece, and however unrefined my palate may be, I know that the statement that "You can't make feta that tastes like feta outside of Greece" is untrue. There's nothing special about the artificial political boundary between Greece and Albania that allows the sheep that graze on one side of the border to produce milk that makes good feta, while preventing the sheep that graze on the other side of the border from doing so.
About lobbying: when one political body repeatedly petitions another political body, that's commonly called "lobbying." The Greek government pushed for years to have feta cheese recognized by the EU as a product that can only be produced in Greece. It had to fight court battles and lobby the EU Commission. Greece now pushes to have the EU write the "feta" cheese PDO into trade deals. If you object to the word "lobbying," I don't know what better word you'll find to describe this.
Just wait until the Germans join the fun, with Hamburg having the copyright on Hamburgers and Frankfurt on Frankfurters.
No one is confused, and if people really care where it's made they can look at the label. This is just trying to use the force of law to limit competition and favor incumbents. They want to claim something is a trademark that isn't.
Actually yes, when we talk about Champagne we DO talk of the location too, because the land has a specific soil which impacts the final taste. Even in France we have tons of different sparkling white wines which are not champagne, no big deal. But champagne is champagne, not any sparkling wine.
Some products are famous and specific enough that customers have a right to be able to know when it's the real deal (and there are many such customers - otherwise these names wouldn't matter at all).
If you want to produce something similar, you can start a new brand with other local businesses (Australeta say), label it Feta-like until customers recognize and choose it because they like it. You can agree whatever rules you like between you for how it's made and what constitutes 'real' Australeta so you have a consistent quality product.
You can even do that and register your own new protected name - see the recent split of Corpinnat from Cava as a recent real-world example: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2019/02/nine-producers-bre...