Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

You take our frankfurters, we take your parmesan

EU, Food: February 26th, 2008 by PR

As reported on The Guardian’s web site on Tuesday, Germany has temporarily won an EU battle to be allowed to call certain domestic cheeses ‘Parmesan’.

The Commission, the EU executive, argued that Germany should not have allowed non-Italian cheese to be labelled “Parmesan”. But Germany, Europe’s second-largest producer of that type of cheese, said “Parmesan” had become a generic term over the centuries for grated hard cheese, and entirely unrelated to the specific Italian product from the Parma region.

If any country should be allowed to hijack the name of another nation’s cheese, surely it is the land of the hamburger and the frankfurter?