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.
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.