221–230 of 475 posts
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That's a interesting example – I totally agree with you in the general case, but I'd actually always thought of 'Greek yoghurt' the same way I thought of 'French fries'!
What would be an example of food that conforms to the "general case"?
I'm not sure exactly why I've never thought of Greek yoghurt in the same way!
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Because in the EU there are laws that say that if something is labeled as virgin olive oil, it has to be olive oil and nothing else. Greek Yoghurt has to be made in Greece and nowhere else. Lobster meat has to be lobster meat, and Kobe beef absolutely has to be Kobe beef. TTIP basically(in extreme simplification) says that if something is allowed in US it should be allowed in any other signatory country - which would…
> Greek Yoghurt has to be made in Greece and nowhere else. This is a really stupid regulation though. It's just protectionism for Greece, like the regulation that you can't call it "champagne" unless the grapes were grown in Champagne, France. There is no reason to expect this; consider Cheddar cheese, Peking duck, French toast, and Hamburgers.
You're not opposed to trademarks, are you? (I don't see how any rational consumer could be, otherwise it's a free-for-all with fraud and fakes.) It's exactly the same thing, except for traditional industry.
People are free to call their new products whatever they like, as long as they don't take one that's already taken. They should compete on their merits, not freeloading on the goodwill established by an existing brand (i.e. geographical area with specific standards of production etc.)
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You can expect that because EU regulation requires it to be that way.
If that's the reason you expect it, the regulation is the sole justification for its own existence. I feel quite comfortable calling that "stupid".
This is not about protectionism for producers, rather the protection of consumers. Noone is telling the consumers what to buy, merely telling them what they can expect when they buy.
To take the example of wine, consumers of Bordeaux wines have accepted that since the classification of growths in 1855 there is a formalised structure and hierarchy of producers. One can know that wine from a First growth will be superior in quality to a lesser growth. From looking at the wine label, a customer immediately can tell that the wine will be of a certain quality without having to take a gamble. Codifying this into EU law allows no other winemaker within the EU to produce a wine with a label that claims the wine is a First Growth Bordeaux. This is great for consumers.
The EU is not protecting producers in that anyone can make wine to compete with these Bordeaux wines but cannot 'piggyback' off of the 'brand' (for want of a better word) that Bordeaux has built for its producers.
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> EU laws aren't being enforced. All the fake olive oil is coming out of Italy. Not seeing how the two sentences follow. Why should the EU be enforcing its laws on food packaged there, if the latter is destined for shipment to the US where pretty much anything goes?
well for one thing wouldn't the EU want to be known as providing good food? The EU should simply not allow the products that are not true to be sourced from a EU country. Your values aren't worth squat if they aren't applied to all you do. This just means that if you are willing to sell shit labeled as flowers to a foreign nation it will happen at home too
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The problem with tomatoes and many other vegetables and fruits is, that they don't grow in the UK so they have to be imported. If they would be imported only when they were as ripe and tasty as the ones you saw in Italy, they would be rotten by the time they arrived in your supermarket in the UK. So, they are harvested when they are not quite ripe. They will ripen a bit more during transport but they will never have…
Tomatoes are something of a passion of mine. The problems are exactly what you describe, with ensuring that transport will not ruin the fruit. Another facet is not only that the tomatoes are picked unripe, but also that the varieties that are grown are ones which optimize for being able to withstand long transport times as well as for uniformity. Consumers as a group like uniform, smooth, red-colored tomatoes, and th…
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>It's difficult to tell if your ev-olive oil is fake without chromatography/spectroscopy equipment but some people try Sorry if I'm asking something obvious, but if it's that difficult to tell, what is the downside of using a fake?
>. It's basically lower-grade olive or vegetable oil with some added green chlorophyl for color. could have totally different nutrition contents than you think you are getting. you could think you are getting nice healthy fats from a natural source. instead you're getting crappy vegetable oil and coloring.
Spanish people weren't buying "fake olive oil" when poisoned. This was canola oil, was advertised as canola oil, and everybody in Spain can spot the difference among the wine and cider or between the cheapest olive oil and other vegetable oils. All this paragraph is false, including the “No one is checking, Olmsted writes".
Not, Your salmon is most probably true salmon, because to use fake salmon is a mess when the true species is breeded in farms since decades, is relatively cheap, can be found easily in your market, and its origin can be tracked easily by the tag.
There is only an "acceptable" substitute to salmon available, and is rainbow trout feeded with carothenes; smaller and more expensive to produce for farmers than true salmon. This is like to say that your coke bottle is probably faked because in the restaurant somebody could refill it with other thing of equal value or more expensive.
Yes, I must admit that milk is basically a cheap imitation currently, and there is a lot of things that must improve in tracking fisheries and marine species, but spreading fears and saying that nobody is surveying this is not correct. You have the NOAA for example, blatantly ignored in the article.
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In USA you need not label GMO food as GMO. [1] Because "The FDA has determined that the fish is as safe and nutritious as nongenetically modified fish, and will therefore not require the company or retailers to label the fish as genetically engineered." [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/19/fda-approves-genetically-modi...
Which is fine (I say as European). Requiring GMO labeling is is about as sensible as requiring DHMO labeling - it's scaremongering not based on science.
It doesn't matter if you think how people choose their food is not sensible, what matters for GMO labeling is whether you think they should be allowed to choose.
Don't know what you mean by DHMO in this context, are you trying to make a joke about water? FWIW we have labeling for food dosed with water, eg bacon, such labeling is perfectly proper.
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In this particular case, as with the Champagne example, the name of the product indicates its origin. Bleu d'Auvergne means "Blue from Auvergne" (a region in France), where blue is short for "blue cheese". If someone outside of France (Auvergne, more specifically) can concoct a product with similar quality, let them label and market it under their own name. If you fork an open source project, wouldn't it be convenien…
But presumably there is more than one brand of Blue d'Avergne? I'm not suggesting one should be able to steal the trademarks of any of those brands. And if someone from a different place makes a product that is compositionally identical then probably their ability to market it will depend on the customer's recognition that it is exactly the same thing.
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For what it's worth, I live Ireland and moved here after 30 years in the US. I agree that the TTIP is a terrible idea (and feels a bit like imperialism chasing after me as I exit). Food on the continent is a sheer delight for the senses. However, if you visit this fine emerald isle, you will find the US has no monopoly on bland, mildly sweet food. (To be fair, we _do_ have some pretty great cheese)
> However, if you visit this fine emerald isle, you will find the US has no monopoly on bland, mildly sweet food. Well, apart from whisky, nobody ever considered Ireland a place for good food. For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine.
That's a myth that's refusing to die, it's not true at all.