I always feel these arguments are a bit disingenuous. You would be extremely hard-pressed to tell "authentic" Feta cheese apart from "Feta-like" cheese produced in any number of places around the world.
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.
> These laws are not about protecting the consumer from inauthentic products. They're about protecting producers from competition.
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?)
Off topic but which Eastern European cheese did you find that you like? The only ones I even saw sold outside its are of origin were usually underwhelming. I’m originally from central/Eastern Europe and know very small and local producers but I’m really interested in what you found you can buy in your area.
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.
I’ve never tried American-made “feta”, but I have tried American-made “cheddar”, and it’s so far from the real stuff it’s closer to “vegan cheese”.
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.
There is actually some very good American cheddar, although mostly it's a bit different than the "real" thing.
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.
"Cheddar cheese" has been produced in America for hundreds of years - the technique was brought over by English colonists. There are many different types of "cheddar" in the US now, including several different regional cheddars (think Vermont cheddar and Wisconsin cheddar). Some are more like English cheddar, some are quite different. But it would be silly to insist that only cheddar from Cheddar in England can be called "cheddar."
> You would be extremely hard-pressed to tell "authentic" Feta cheese
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.
No offense, but there's nothing particularly special about Feta produced in Greece. Feta-style cheeses are produced across a fairly wide region in the Eastern Mediterranean, and I don't think the style is so singular that it can't be (or isn't) authentically reproduced elsewhere.
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.
Greece was just an example, hence the “say” it’s not close to my favourite.
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.
> 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.
My point is mainly that these are producer protections masquerading as consumer protections.
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.
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.
In NL they sell feta and next to it a product called white cheese. It's not the same and much cheaper but in [more complex] meals where the cheese is not the dominant flavor you wont notice the difference. Say a salad made of large chunks of feta, 1/4 tomatoes, q-cumber, onion, oregano, salt, black pepper, vinegar and olive oil. I would use the traditional product. If the chunks are smaller and the salad has 10 more ingredients the white cheese will do just fine.
I need to be able to tell the difference tho. My interest seem to be aligned with the producers.
> 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.
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:
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.
> PDO regulations absolutely focus precisely on ingredients, process and the final product.
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.
> There's nothing particularly special or distinctive or uniform about Greek feta.
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.
> You would be extremely hard-pressed to tell "authentic" Feta cheese apart from "Feta-like" cheese produced in any number of places around the world.
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.
I've had feta in Greece and feta elsewhere in the Balkans. The range of differences between feta cheeses produced in different parts of Greece is not necessarily smaller than the difference between a feta produced in Epirus (Northwest Greece) and Albania (possibly even by Greek Albanians!). The geographic indication is nonsensical if the point is to ensure uniform quality or taste.
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.
There are sheep and goat's milk cheeses made in the Mediterrannean and in the Balkans and as far as Romania, yes, but those cheeses are not made in the same way as feta and they have a different character than feta. For example Sirene, a Romanian cheese is sometimes made with sheep and goat's milk, but it's a softer and overall milder cheese than feta. They would taste same-y to anyone unused to eating for example feta or sirene, but not to Greeks and Romanians.
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.
> those cheeses are not made in the same way as feta and they have a different character than feta
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.
Nope, that's a load of ignorant horseshit. Do yourself a favour and read about the PDO process. It's nothing to do with "lobbying" anyone. "The Greek government" did not "lobby" anyone, rather the producers of feta cheese in specific regions of Greece applied for their product to be given a PDO by the EU. The application was of course supported by the Greek government. At the same time, it was contested by the Danish, German and French goverments because industries in those countries had been selling cow's milk cheese as "feta" for sometime and didn't want to lose the revenue. These three countries also didn't "lobby" anything - they contested the PDO application in the courts. They lost, so feta is a Greek PDO cheese.
> 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.
"Culinary point of view"? Give me a break. You haven't even tried Greek feta, let alone all those other cheeses...
I've eaten Greek feta in Greece and identical cheeses elsewhere in the Balkans. I obviously can't prove that to you over the internet, but I'm okay with that.
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.
The word, maybe. The cheese, not. You can't make feta that tastes like feta outside of Greece.
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.
I'm not claiming to have gone on an extensive cheese-tasting tour of the Balkans, and I'm certainly not claiming that my palate is as refined as that of the cheese goddess.
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.
That's disingenuous. If I buy a wine labelled "Champagne" I expect a dry sparkling wine, not a random red wine from a certain region in France. It is used to indicate product type, not origin.
You can't buy red wine with the name champagne, that's a silly notion. I expect champagne to match not only the wine type, but also quality requirements, specific production methods, grape types, and yes also area of production.
That's exactly the point I was making, a different variety of wine wouldn't be champagne. And it would behoof you to note the order of matching you yourself presented. Area of production comes last.
Just wait until the Germans join the fun, with Hamburg having the copyright on Hamburgers and Frankfurt on Frankfurters.
It's both. It's like Idaho potatoes, you expect some type of potato but also some geographic origin. When the product type is also a location you can't easily untangle either.
Yeah, I know. But when we say Champagne, we clearly mean sparking wine of a certain style -- not the location.
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.
> Yeah, I know. But when we say Champagne, we clearly mean sparking wine of a certain style -- not the location.
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.
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.