Parmesan, Feta, Black Forest and other injustices in labelling

Last updated on: March 15, 2014 at 11:07 am by Jane the Actuary

Parmesan, Feta, Black Forest and other injustices in labelling 2014-03-15T11:07:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So just catching up on the news over the weekend, including a report from multiple sources, but here from The Guardian, that the EU, as a part of the latest round of trade talks with the U.S., want to ban American cheesemakers from using traditional place-name based labels for their cheese, or, more specifically, place the same place-of-origin restrictions as currently exist for such items as Champagne. Says The Guardian,

The argument is that the American-made cheeses are shadows of the original European varieties and cut into sales and identity of the European cheeses. The Europeans say parmesan should only come from Parma, Italy, not those familiar green cylinders that American companies sell. Feta should only be from Greece, even though feta isn’t a place. The EU argues it “is so closely connected to Greece as to be identified as an inherently Greek product.”

The proposed impact is wide-ranging:

The EU is expected to make similar attempts to restrict marketing of US-made cheeses, possibly including parmesan, asiago, gorgonzola, feta, fontina, grana, gruyère, muenster, neufchatel and romano.
And it may not be just cheese. Other products could include bologna, Black Forest ham, Greek yogurt, Valencia oranges and prosciutto, among other foods.

And the article emphasizes the impact on U.S. made cheeses, which meant it was unclear to me whether this meant that it is already the case that in Europe, that the only item labelled Parmesan is imported from Parma? Or are they planning on applying a double-standard, so that within Europe, Parmesan cheese refers to a production process and style in the U.S., to Parma-made cheese? The Guardian article certainly gave the latter impression, so I looked around a little bit. Online cheese retailers in the UK seemed to sell only Parmesan from Italy, only Gouda from Holland, etc., but it wasn’t immediately clear whether that just meant that the sorts of cheeses you’d go to the trouble of buying online were upscale enough as to always come from their place-of-origin, or whether, in fact, local preferences for particular types of cheeses remained strong enough that the English prefer their English cheeses for day-to-day cooking anyway.

So then I went to Wikipedia. Here’s the article on “Geographical indications and traditional specialities in the European Union” which gives some history on the ever-expanding reach of Protected Designation of Origin protections, and here’s the article on Parmesan cheese. Fun fact: when Kraft sells its Parmesan cheese in the EU, it calls it “pamesello italiano.”

Which brings me to the solution to this whole issue. The EU is being silly and going way too far with its protection of place-name based foodstuff names, but it’s easy to accommodate them: we’ll just have to rename our cheeses, using the same principles as Kraft followed with pamesello cheese; something similar-sounding with a suitable connotation. We do have a National Dairy Board so it should be possible to come up with universal names rather than a new set of trademarks. Grocers and cookbooks can offer a set of “translations”/substitutions, and the labels themselves can say, “formerly known as Parmesan.”

And, in the end, the Europeans would lose. Everyone knows that if a Parmesan cheese is labelled “imported from Italy” it’s more expensive but can be assumed to be of better quality, and maybe even of significantly different flavor than its American counterpart, as different as powdered ginger vs. real minced ginger. But if the generic name is pamesello, will the Italians really be able to sell Parmesan and have that same connotation of, “same product but vastly higher quality”? Wouldn’t they be better off with the ability to label their product “authentic Parmesan”?

Xerox battled for years to get people to refer to photocopies as such rather than as “Xerox copies.” Same with tissues and Kleenex. I think they’ve won. But as a consequence, they’ve also lost their pre-eminent place in the market.

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