How we're scammed into eating phony food

Brands and growing regions are both "natural kinds", insofar as they're both things you would expect to evolve from many businesses selling a (complex) commodity from the same region, sometimes competing, sometimes colluding. They both make sense, and can both be used together. But they shouldn't be conflated.

Brands are organizational signifiers. They speak of privately-held organizational knowledge and experience brought-to-bear.

A growing region, meanwhile, is a signifier for natural local factors of the region that defy replication. Anyone operating an organization in that region will reap some of the benefits of that region; even Starbucks coffee beans, if grown in Brazil, would contain some Brazilian terroir.

IP rights protect brands, because brands are inherently rivalrous things that can be bought and protected at the organizational level, like other IP rights. IP rights do not protect growing regions, because growing regions are not inherently rivalrous; anyone can "sneak into" the appropriate region (buying up land previously used for non-growing purposes, etc.) and found a new organization with a claim to the growing region.

But sometimes, "growing regions" are also (secretly) the results of colluding organizations of humans, rather than natural factors. Champagne isn't bubbly because of anything the Champagne area of France does to it. It's a long-standing agreement between the organizations that operate in the region to make it that way.

And that is a brand. But it's a brand that exists on the "wrong level", so to speak; it's a brand held in a sort of commons that any organization is free to enter. Nobody has stewardship over such a brand.

It makes perfect sense for Champagne to be a brand—but it makes no sense for Champagne the growing region to be the brand. It would be much more sensible to have the brand exist at the human level: to call together all the organizations that are currently dubbed "Champagne growers", and tell them that they now own equity stakes in a trust that in turn owns the IP rights to the trademark "champagne."

---

> US food practices would be considered similar to accepting fake iphones, mcD's or Coca-Cola

Ah, but I would accept those things! If, and only if, they were structurally identical to the real ones.

"Ghost shift" products[1] are indistinguishable from the real thing—because they are the real thing. They're produced in the same factories, by the same people, with the same raw inputs. It's just that they're not being produced toward the revenue of the contracted client who submitted the production spec. So they're "knock-offs." But they're structurally identical.

I think most people, if told that they could either buy an iPhone; or buy a "myPhone" that's made of all the same components in the same layout with the same tolerances as a real iPhonee (and, as such, runs iOS just fine), but for $200 less... would leap to buy the "myPhone." Everyone who wasn't, in fact, paying a premium for the Veblen-good nature of an expensive-product-as-status-symbol, would take the myPhone.

"Knock-off" has a negative connotation because many things can't be knocked off perfectly. But many other things can. The whole issue with media piracy is the fact that digital media can be knocked off perfectly. Many inorganic products (Coca-Cola) can be spectroscopically picked apart and cloned (though likely using an original, white-box-engineered process) to tolerances where nobody can discern the two. And organic products often have enough intra-batch variation that even with identical cultivars, differences in terroir between two crops grown half-way across the world from one-another can't be picked out from the noise of the inherent peculiarities of each individual specimen.

Growing regions are important precisely in the cases where knock-offs of things from that region won't have the qualities that the "authentic" things from that region have. That's the situation where knowing the growing region of the thing gives you useful information to influence your purchase. Otherwise, growing regions are just misbehaving, wrong-level brands—and leaky abstractions, as can be seen in the Italian olive-oil example.

[1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...

---

And one more thought:

Growing regions are becoming outmoded, displaced by brands. Have you tried to buy an apple lately? There are now[2] a thousand "varieties" of apple, different at every store—because those "varieties" are now simply the brands of apple-growers, instead of cultivars of apple or even growing regions for apples.

[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episo...

FWIW, having bought a bottle of the non-organic EVOO at Costco today, I can say it is labeled as if it is real.

You're complaining about what you assume is compared, and then doing the same thing.

You admit american mass-produced products are terrible, compared to their international equivalents, and then go on to claim that US 'hand crafted' products are better than the mass-produced products of other countries.

> Assuming you have space for one in your home

When my wife and I were first married we lived in an impossibly small efficiency and still made room for a chest freezer because of the tremendous efficiencies in food storage it provided for - it was something like $200 on sale at Costco. We still have it, 15 years later doing good service for us and payed for itself many times over.

> And that is a brand. But it's a brand that exists on the "wrong level", so to speak; it's a brand held in a sort of commons that any organization is free to enter. Nobody has stewardship over such a brand.

How is that a "wrong level" ? You're creating a replicability issue to strip part of the products of their rights to brand recognition.

> I think most people, if told that they could either buy an iPhone; or buy a "myPhone"

That would be a new brand, though. The question is whether this new myPhone producer be able to market his products under the brand iPhones. Because that's what you're advocating if you're offering to let people produce "champagne" everywhere, for instance. As a matter of fact, when you say :

> Brands and growing regions are both "natural kinds", insofar as they're both things you would expect to evolve from many businesses selling a (complex) commodity from the same region

I feel you're misled. Growing region recognition is mostly about grandfathering older products, which emerged in an environment where branding was irrelevant, into modern business practices. You don't see it as much now, because everyone brands their products nowadays (e.g. you don't see Silicon Valley software, or Rust Belt autos).