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(I know, I know, but it's the way we diarylanders have done it for generations.)

2014-03-05 21:49

Very evil, slightly cheesy

Via Margaret von Transblawg, but on @twitter, we have a thing about cheese and its part in Free and Democratic Republic United States America (FDRUSA)'s newest hellspawn treaty thing, the dreaded TTIP. It begins with deftly factual misinformation:

Europe takes cheese names very, very seriously. The EU affords �protected designation of origin� (PDO) status to 180 cheeses, from Allg�uer Bergk�se to West Country Farmhouse Cheddar.

This is as factually correct as it is fundamentally dishonest: we suspect lawyers must have been involved. "West Country Farmhouse Cheddar" is indeed a protected designation, but the point you are apparently intended to miss is that this was a consolation prize when Cheddar as such and per se failed to get any protection, what with New Zealand Cheddar having been imported to Blighty since the (Second World) War.

Again

As my colleague Forrest Wickman explained last fall, the cheese sold as Brie in the United States bears little resemblance to the Bries protected by the EU.

This is one of those "Europe is a country" moments (again made scholastically unfalse with citations we don't re-cite of "Brie de Meaux", which is presumably a protected designation in the EU). Because the facts on the ground are that we've been living in the EU since it was still the EEC, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and lately the Netherlands, and we've had more crap brie than you could shake a lorry-load of crap baguettes at in both countries.

Take it from us: if you want decent brie outside of France itself you are going to spend an unreasonable amount of time reading labels and an even more unreasonable amout of time leaving it somewhere warm-ish to ripen.

Everyone we know seems to hate Slate; on this showing, we can kind of see their point.

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