The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium establishes the rules for production and enforces them. Nobody’s stopping you from making your own Parmigiano wherever you want, you just can’t call it that, because the name acts as a quality guarantee for the consumer.
Otherwise you’d have a situation like buying crap on Amazon where you never know if you’re going to receive a functioning gadget or not.
Nobody’s stopping you from making your own Parmigiano wherever you want, you just can’t call it that, because the name acts as a quality guarantee for the consumer.
So they are stopping me from doing that. If I can’t call something what the consumer expects, I can’t make the thing the consumer expects. Because that’s what this discussion is about: these kinds of labels should be only for quality, not for region of production. I am not advocating for dropping the label or handing it out everywhere.
Unless you’re trying to tell me the cheese is necessarily of worse quality in a way that’s not physically measurable just because it wasn’t made in the same region, the region label adds exactly nothing above a purely quality-based label.
It’s a brand name, they can do whatever they want with it. Would you be up in arms if coca-cola decided to produce only in a specific area? Because that’s kinda what they did with the sludge.
And yes, for some things the area matters, the soil, the weather, etc. Again, it acts as a, albeit minimal, guarantee for the customer, that’s why it exists
You understand that this whole discussion started with somebody saying “wouldn’t it be cool if these labels were solely based on quality instead of location”?
Yes, we all know that it’s a brand name, and they can do whatever they want with it. We are talking about how that maybe shouldn’t be the case. Do you understand that? What value do you bring to the discussion by saying “but they’re allowed to!!!1!1!”?
If the location has an effect on quality, it is measurable purely by quality without taking location into account. If you need to know the location because it’s not measurable, it shouldn’t be taken into account.
No, you can’t make Parmigiano Reggiano outside of the area of, drum roll, Parma or Reggio (with a few convenient exception)! I mean it’s not hard to understand that if it’s got the location in the name, then the location is part of the product! If you change the product, then it may be as good as you want, even better, but it’s not the same product, so you have to use a different name, that’s all!
Especially since, unlike for example Champagne, Parmigiano Reggiano is, again, a fucking brand name, you can’t brand watches as Rolex without Rolex coming to tear you a new one!
You can make Grana wherever you want! Go Grana your heart out! But I used to work in the dairy industry, and let me tell you, location makes A LOT of difference, there are a shitload of Italians in the US for example, but they have a lot of difficulties replicating what they used to make in Italy, there’s got to be a reason, right?
The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium establishes the rules for production and enforces them. Nobody’s stopping you from making your own Parmigiano wherever you want, you just can’t call it that, because the name acts as a quality guarantee for the consumer.
Otherwise you’d have a situation like buying crap on Amazon where you never know if you’re going to receive a functioning gadget or not.
So they are stopping me from doing that. If I can’t call something what the consumer expects, I can’t make the thing the consumer expects. Because that’s what this discussion is about: these kinds of labels should be only for quality, not for region of production. I am not advocating for dropping the label or handing it out everywhere.
Unless you’re trying to tell me the cheese is necessarily of worse quality in a way that’s not physically measurable just because it wasn’t made in the same region, the region label adds exactly nothing above a purely quality-based label.
It’s a brand name, they can do whatever they want with it. Would you be up in arms if coca-cola decided to produce only in a specific area? Because that’s kinda what they did with the sludge.
And yes, for some things the area matters, the soil, the weather, etc. Again, it acts as a, albeit minimal, guarantee for the customer, that’s why it exists
You understand that this whole discussion started with somebody saying “wouldn’t it be cool if these labels were solely based on quality instead of location”?
Yes, we all know that it’s a brand name, and they can do whatever they want with it. We are talking about how that maybe shouldn’t be the case. Do you understand that? What value do you bring to the discussion by saying “but they’re allowed to!!!1!1!”?
If the location has an effect on quality, it is measurable purely by quality without taking location into account. If you need to know the location because it’s not measurable, it shouldn’t be taken into account.
No, you can’t make Parmigiano Reggiano outside of the area of, drum roll, Parma or Reggio (with a few convenient exception)! I mean it’s not hard to understand that if it’s got the location in the name, then the location is part of the product! If you change the product, then it may be as good as you want, even better, but it’s not the same product, so you have to use a different name, that’s all!
Especially since, unlike for example Champagne, Parmigiano Reggiano is, again, a fucking brand name, you can’t brand watches as Rolex without Rolex coming to tear you a new one!
You can make Grana wherever you want! Go Grana your heart out! But I used to work in the dairy industry, and let me tell you, location makes A LOT of difference, there are a shitload of Italians in the US for example, but they have a lot of difficulties replicating what they used to make in Italy, there’s got to be a reason, right?