In a Jan. 4 tweet we predicted:
And so it happened. Two days later, and the German papers are busy discussing the fate of Nuremberg Brats, Black Forest Ham, and Frankfurt Handkäse (which is "hand cheese" and may cause very dirty minds to ask if it has anything to do with masturbation, but hey...).
Will Handkäse be made in Houston, asks Frankfurter Allgemeine.
They probably looked for a city name starting with H to alliterate for their literate librarian readers, because there is no logic to the question at all.
Have they ever been to Houston?
Most def not.
While everybody is emotional and the cooler minds point out that the upset is a sideshow that obscures more pressing, real issues, we want to weigh in on what protection of regional foods really is.
Tradition, culture, money? All of them, true, but in a more general sense putting up legal protection of food names like the EU Database of Origin and Registration does is above all one thing:
A legal reaction to the elimination of resource constraints and to the spread of production know how and technology.
Take French fish soup specialty Bouillabaisse or the northern German coast dish Labskaus. For the longest time, seafood specialty dishes were protected not by law by by technology, or the lack thereof.
Reliable refrigeration changed the game for seafood. Nowadays, you can cook up your own 1000 miles inland or buy it ready made in the frozen food section.
Meat products saw a similar development, but refrigeration is only one aspect there. Species of animals were much more regional until only decades ago, raw materials for certain recipes were not readily available.
Just ask older Australians about Mexican cuisine without cilantro.
Making champagne is a good example of production know how and technology in the liquid foods arena. Once learned, you can produce champagne in California's Napa Valley. You can do it in Germany, too, but unlike the more relaxed Americans, the Germans cannot call their bubbly champagne. If you do in the K-land, you get fined, you can even go to prison for it.
We can bemoan the loss of traditional food for as long we want to, but there really is no reason to keep the price of "regional food" inflated because we refuse to accept that progress exists.
I don't care if my sausage is called Nuremberg Brat, but I do want to know what's in it. Which means, no unlabelled GMO food please.
So, the discussion comes full circle: both the traditional food proponents and the GMO folks are concerned with labels only.
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