This being lemmy, you might want to try the open-source alternative, Grana Padano
Funny I always use Grana Padano because I’m poor now I will start saying is because I support OSS
Ingredients: cows milk, salt, rennet, microchips…
Am I the only one who doesn’t see how this is supposed to guard against couterfeits?
It’s probably something like an RFID tag that you can scan to check if the cheese is authentic.
Shady trenchcoat figure on a street corner: “Hey kid, wanna buy some cheese? I got the stuff that’ll make you mouse for days.”
This is how many years old news?
A bit over 2.
Thanks!
Are they really trying to combat counterfeiters, or are they trying to permanently tag & geolocate all their cheese enthusiasts?
That only increases the barrier for entry into the market, but doesn’t make it impossible to counterfeit.
The only time such a scheme would work is if the cost of counterfeiting the tags is higher than the cost of turning a counterfeit operation into a legitimate one.
And even then, it’d be better to use hologram seals on packaging or embedded into the cheese crust instead of “edible RFID”. Most crusts aren’t even edible so it seems more like a gimmick than anything else.
So: more sinister explanations acrually hold more weight here.
It might go all the way to the top, but it definitely comes out the bottom.
Sounds illegal
I will eat so much that the cheese-lords will be able to track me across the globe.
Will kraft follow suit with their American cheese?
Is anyone trying to make counterfeit American cheese? As far as I understand it it’s generally the US who is producing counterfeit European cheese.
Sarcasm. Ie. Nobody is going to make American cheese. 😂
Sorry for the youtube link.
How about a little something about what it’s about, to help us decide if it’s worth our time to look. More helpful than an apology.
lunatics
“Oh, well if they’re lunatics, no point in listening to what they say.”
[“Should ban them for misinformation so we never hear their madness.”]
Gotta love those fallacy combos, like this circular-reasoning echo-chamber ad-hominem hasty-generalisation. The power of pre-deciding and curating a socially dominant groupthink terrorising for coercive conformity to “the one true way”. The pithy shrieks, of “lunatics”, "witches, “conspiracy theorists”… get around the world a dozen times, while educated minds, open minds, curious minds, genuine sceptics, nuance seekers, honest researchers, epistemologists, etc are still getting out of bed. … And have already been cast out as these dangerous “others” to fear.
Oh look, there are patents for putting wifi nano-biochips in jabs… Huh. …
But still, the power-corrupted nepo-club of blackmailers and child traffickers, who hijack hierarchies and have revolving doors to regulators, and kill populations by the millions in unnecessary “resource wars” to maintain dominance… maybe they still care, and wouldn’t use those on us. … I’m sure it’s fine. It’s just cheese. It’s just to protect their intellectual property purity and profits. For “profit medicine”, saying “a patient cured is a customer lost, and a dead patient is just a cost of business” is probably nothing to look into and consider and scrutinise.
For super super sure, maybe they care. :3
Funny how world views get protected, with lies we tell ourselves, when the crooks abusing us admit what they’re doing, if only we’d look beyond our world view we re-write over and over [like an llm trained on itself, getting into hallucinations more and more removed from reality] to see where they promote their plans.
Just as pens make poor binoculars, belief makes a poor means to determine reality.
Eat verification wheel.
Big Cheese is in charge of everything.
to be fair that wheel in the picture is $1000+. i imagine it wouldn’t be that difficult to make a shitty fake one at a fraction of the cost that looks exactly the same, sell it for the same $1000+, and no one but a connoisseur of high end cheese would be able to taste a difference
I just want to point out that a wheel like this will require about 540 litres of milk to make, so without substituting with some mineral or palm oil you’re not likely to produce for a fraction, it looks like wholesale milk price will be around $200 already (but prices I found differ a lot, this was the cheapest)
If nobody but a connoisseur can tell the difference, why exactly should we, the consumers, care that their monopoly on this type of cheese has competition at a lower price?
Isn’t capitalism supposed to “breed innovation” in a “free market” built upon “competition” and “supply and demand”?
if you’re a consumer who doesn’t care, you’re probably not buying a $1000 cheese wheel because it looks like the “real” $1000 cheese. you’re buying the cheaper product that’s not counterfeited to pretend to be something it’s not
But that’s the point. If it tastes the same to everyone but those who make it their obsession, it’s got nothing to do with not caring. Whether you can afford to drop $1000 on a cheese wheel or not doesn’t factor into it.
Cheese isn’t branding and marketing, it’s coagulated milk. If a “counterfeiter” has figured out how to make the same cheese then they’re not making counterfeit cheese, they’re making the same cheese without the monopoly, branding, and price gouging.
The very thing capitalism is supposed to reward, but doesn’t in the bastardised protectionist form that exists in reality.
Why should consumers care about the financial exploitation of a monopoly? Restaurants that buy this regularly will happily buy a $500 wheel from someone else if it tastes the same to everyone but the snobbiest of cheese snobs, I’m sure.
This is DRM for physical products because they want to protect their monopoly and monopolistic prices.
i mean i’m not simping for capitalism here, but i think you’re confusing what a “monopoly” is. parmigiano-reggiano cheese is a legally protected term designating that only cheeses produced in certain areas can be labeled as such. no one’s saying you can’t copy the cheese and sell your own products, just that you can’t label it parmigiano reggiano if you’re not making it in those areas. people pay extra for it because it has higher standards of quality. the problem with counterfeiters is they’re basically making whatever quality they feel like and passing it off as the more expensive version.
“monopoly” means a company is taking over the entire market by snuffing out competition, not even allowing anyone to get a foothold in producing a competing product (see google). that’s not what’s happening with this cheese. some people buy the $1000 cheese. many, many more people buy just plain “parmesan” because it’s good enough for their needs. neither is the “wrong” choice, but there are definitely choices. but surely you can agree that false advertising can’t be a good thing?
There’s a ton of cheap Parmesan cheese out there which isn’t intentionally defrauding people.
First, things like Parmesan cheese are as much cultural products as they are commercial products, so calling parmesan to something done outside of that cultural context is cultural appropriation - you can make parmersan style cheese but you have the moral duty to make it clear it’s not the actual thing. Second, a free market is only a free market if there’s transparency about the products, including their origin.
First, things like Coca Cola are as much cultural products as they are commercial products, so calling Coca Cola to something done outside of that cultural context is cultural appropriation.
Do you see how silly that argument is?
It’s coagulated milk, the only culture is the bacteria. This isn’t a family recipe being made in a farmstead by 5 people who personally milk the cows themself. It’s a factory. With rows upon rows of cheese produced every day, worth millions of $. Stored in giant warehouses and transported all around the world. It’s big business, not culture. Just because they have great marketing doesn’t mean they’re producing any form of culture.
The same applies to the Scottish whisky trade and Champagne in France. If it’s so cultural then locals would be making the stuff, but they’re not, it’s a large monopolistic business. In the same way the scotch whisky trade is becoming monopolised by the likes of Chivas via Pernod Ricard.
If you genuinely believe that this is cultural appropriation then you should be having a word with the giant corporations that have put so much legislation around these products that it’s near impossible for small independent competitors to try their hand at it. If it were truly culture there would be a thriving craft scene like there is with beer.
There is a thriving craft cheese scene. I’ll walk down to my local farmers market here in Northern Italy later and there are a handful of stalls selling various cheeses. If that isn’t happening wherever you live, it’s not bacause of the rules about Parmeggiano labeling.
Perhaps I’ll also pick up a bottle of one if the “metodo classico” bubblies since the Champagne is way over priced. There is a nice wine-by-the-litre place on the way back.
Nobody needs to be stealing each other’s labels.
Various cheeses or various parmigianos?
The discussion isn’t about cheese as a concept but about a very specific type that has used legislation to create a protectionist monopoly.
I can walk down to the local whisky shop here in northern Scotland and choose from various whiskies. But it’s only an illusion of choice. Despite the romantic marketing and harkening back to the founding origins it’s nothing but factory made mass produced goods now. It’s big business, not culture. Our ignorance of the ease of manufacture and our love of romanticism is used against us in marketing in order to justify a higher price poifnt. The same applies to Parmigiano (and not Parmeggiano, unless your Italian is of the Texan dialect).
Various different types of Parmigiano are available indeed. Some are made in large factories while other ones are made by a couple brothers with some cows. The culture is indeed there, which does not mean such a cheese can not be replicated or even made better somewhere else. Indeed, if you buy Parmigiano outside of Italy it is likely that what you’re buying is coming from a large production facility. However in Italy it is not uncommon to have small productions serving just a few villages.
However, regardless of this, counterfeit products are a problem for this system. Counterfeit products are not necessarily worse, however do not need to comply with the same quality standards which are in fact required in the production of Parmigiano. Allowing counterfeit products to be sold, especially in Italy, would likely drive out the production of proper Parmigiano and eventually result in a quality degradation.
After all, Parmigiano tends to be a cheap product; don’t be a dick and buy the real thing. I believe price increased recently, but I still see 36 months aged Parmigiano for about 15 €/kg while in Spain it is common to pay 10-15 €/kg for fresh cheese.
I can walk down to the local whisky shop here in northern Scotland and choose from various whiskies. But it’s only an illusion of choice. Despite the romantic marketing and harkening back to the founding origins it’s nothing but factory made mass produced goods now.
Is anything stopping you from making your own and selling it at 90% of the price? Other than the decade plus that it takes…
a) joy to you for spotting my spelling mistake.
Here in N. Italy I don’t have a wide variety of Parmigiano, regardless of spelling, but a good variety of hard cheeses of both cows and sheeps milk. They don’t claim to be from Reggia di Parma because that would be a lie. Beyond the local ones, there are the grana Padano and there is the Sardinian guy who has various ages of Peccorino Sardo. Can’t remember if there is much Peccorino Romano around. They have lots of that down in Rome.
So… yes, there is lots of cheese around. Up here we don’t get much of the small producer Parmigiano, which gets sold at the markets down in Emilia Romagna. Almost by definition, for me, much less you, to ever see a sliver of it, it has to be from a big producer. Or you can have a locally made grana and it might even be good. That producer is just going to have to build their own reputation and not freelode on someone else’s.
Fake real cheese? Like the stuff that comes in a can?
You might be thinking of peaches.
Cheese comes from a can. It was put there by a man. In a factory, downtown!
If I had my little way, I’d eat cheese every day
Movin’ to the country, gonna eat a lot of cheeses…
exactly. pasteurized processed cheese food product
Short answer: rich people are dumb and spend their money on dumb shit to flex on us poors
Something something Cheese Pizza conspiracy. It all comes together.
Presumably the counterfeit cheese doesn’t have these chips. Therefore I’ll make sure to only purchase counterfeit cheese.
Probably cheaper too
