I'm sure some people are unhappy. But I am, as a consumer, very happy that I can easily distinguish proper feta from second-rate imitations that used to be sold with the same name. Same for a multitude of other cheeses: say, halloumi used to be some random chewy white blob, and now I know there's a certain guarantee behind the name.
Turkish or Bulgarian feta are neither second-rate nor imitations. "Feta" is just the Greek name for a range of cheeses produced across much of the Eastern Mediterranean. But Greek cheese-producers lobbied the Greek government, and then Greece lobbied the EU, so in Europe, only cheese produced in a few regions of Greece may be called "feta." That's not because those regions produce the best feta cheese, or even because they produce a unique variety of feta that could be reliably distinguished from feta produced elsewhere. It's because they managed to convince their government to grant them a monopoly on the name. That's it.
> Turkish or Bulgarian feta are neither second-rate nor imitations.
They also have local names, which would be fine to use. People are not completely stupid. I mean, halloumi was unheard of here [some continental EU country] a couple of years ago, and now it’s quite popular. So people can learn new names.
We can understand that cava and prosecco are similar (to a first order approximation, please don’t bite). Same for raki and ouzo. Or port and madeira. There is nothing wrong with that.
But internationally, the type of cheese they make is far better known as "feta" than by its Turkish or Bulgarian names. But for reasons that have nothing to do with quality or authenticity, they're not allowed to sell their cheese under the name that international customers expect that type of cheese to be called.
> So people can learn new names
Of course, but the point of turning "feta" into a geographical indication was to gain a monopoly on a name that people around the world associate with a certain type of cheese. Other producers of that type of cheese who do not reside in Greece are concretely harmed by this. It's particularly unfair to other producers in the Balkans and Turkey, who have every bit as much cultural heritage of producing this type of cheese as Greeks do.
> But internationally, the type of cheese they make is far better known as "feta" than by its Turkish or Bulgarian names.
Well, tough luck. My home-made cola can be every bit as good as Coca-Cola, but I can’t go around calling it that way.
As other people noted, the regulations are there to protect local producers and consumers, not non-local producers. They can get their own tradition recognised and get their own PDO instead.
> It's particularly unfair to other producers in the Balkans and Turkey, who have every bit as much cultural heritage of producing this type of cheese as Greeks do.
Nobody is preventing them from making any kind of cheese.
> My home-made cola can be every bit as good as Coca-Cola, but I can’t go around calling it that way.
Coca-Cola is a brand name, not a general term for a type of drink that's been in use for hundreds of years.
"Feta" is just the word that Greek people have used for the past few hundred years to refer to a range of different brined white cheeses that have been produced for thousands of years in the Eastern Mediterranean. Through an accident of history (namely, Greek immigration to Anglophone countries), the Greek word for those types of cheeses has spread around the world. If things had turned out slightly differently (for example, if large numbers of Turks had immigrated to the US in the early 20th Century), we might be calling feta cheese "sirene" or "beyaz peynir."
Greece is now cashing in on that linguistic happenstance to try to force competition out of the market.
> Nobody is preventing them from making any kind of cheese.
They're just preventing them from marketing the cheese under its common name. It's as if one country gained a monopoly on the word "chocolate," and forced producers in other countries to invent a new name that nobody recognized.
