[jkldotio]

Feta comes from φέτα/~"slice", so it's not named after a region. Melbourne has one of the largest Greek populations in the world. Why don't these Greek people have right to their heritage? If the British were to start trying to say that "sandwich" was protected and American sandwiches were "inauthentic and deceptive" would you take such a claim seriously?

[alkonaut]

> Why don't these Greek people have right to their heritage?

Probably because it would be difficult to find any reasonable middle ground between “can only be made at the geographical origin” and “can be made anywhere by anyone”

Also for a lot of product the origin more than the heritage of the people is central, such as the climate and soil in Champagne (which perhaps soon will be most historically authentic in southern Sweden after some climate change).

This is about regions keeping the right to their products, not necessarily people retaining that right. Move from Champagne and you can’t make Champagne. Not that complicated. Feta is a regional produce too - the name doesn’t really change that.

> If the British were to start trying to say that "sandwich" was protected and American sandwiches were "inauthentic and deceptive" would you take such a claim seriously?

No?

[jkldotio]

So you've conflated regional with generic, a distinction I pointed out first, without any worked reasoning at all.

People generally lose their trademarks quickly if they don't enforce them and allow them to go into the language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_generici...

I honestly don't see you as providing a real argument from first principles.

[alkonaut]

I used Champagne as an example, but the same applies to Parmesan, Feta and Västerbotten which are reginal by tradition in one case and by name in two.

What’s important to me as a consumer is I want to support the producers of the original region, not much else.

[unishark]

But the poster you challenged was specifically complaining about a generic product name that was not a place name. Because it opens Pandora's box in terms of every generic food name being reclaimed by the place it originated.

The list of place names which are also products, and the rhetorical ease of defending their protection for such cases, does not make the argument about protecting local generic names as well, precisely because it is not as easy to defend such names. What criterion would you use? The degree of feel-good small-town credentials of the claimant?

[alkonaut]

I agree there may be a subtle difference between “actually geographic” and “traditionally regional but generic” but I don’t think it’s actually important. That Pandora’s box seems well worth opening.

If a product was made exclusively in a region for some amount of time (say a few hundred years, and nowhere else) then I think that’s a pretty strong case for protecting that tradition in the region whether the produce bears that name or not.

[unishark]

Seems like that would still include all foods that have been around a long time in old countries. Such as sushi for Japan.

[cheese_goddess]

"Feta" is not the heritage of Greek people. It's a Protected Designation of Origin that covers specific geographical locations in Greece, the regions of Thessaly, Thrace, Epirus, Macedonia, Central Greece, Peloponse and Lesvos. Greeks, living in Greece, outside of these regsions, cannot sell their white sheep's milk cheese as feta. For example Cretan cheesemakers, 100% Greek themselves, can't sell their white sheep's milk as feta and must sell it as "white cheese" instead.

Now, if Greeks, living in Greece, making cheese with the milk of Greek animals can't call their cheese "feta" why should Australians whose grandparents came from Greece be able to?