Sounds illegal
Eat verification wheel.
How good is this counterfeit cheese if you have to invest cheese DRM?
At what point does it stop being a counterfeit cheese and became a real cheese made somewhere outside the origin protection?
I assume it’s like the whole Champagne only comes from Champagne. Are their other sparkling wines that taste as good, I’m sure. But they want to sell a name.
Kentucky tried to do the same with Bourbon Whiskey, saying if it was made outside of Kentucky you’d have to call it something else, but I don’t believe that stuck
You are correct, it did not stick, but by US law Bourbon does have to be made in the US. Associating alcohols to a region has always been a tedious argument, but distilled alcohol is especially silly. For things like Champagne they can claim things like the soil of the area impacts the flavor (Vidalia onions), the culture of specific grapes in the region are important (this isolated variety of grapes are only cultivated here), or maybe something in the air contributes to the process (Belgian sours), but Bourbon just requires it be made with at least 51% corn and stored in a charred oak barrel.
Bourbon may have originated from Kentucky there is nothing about Kentucky or the US that impacts the process. I can make IPAs without being in the UK and I can make Berliner Weisse without going to Germany, I see no difference with Bourbon.
I agree, I’m going to mention something I’ve mentioned before though because I love it as a base for why one world one human should be prevent. (BS I just made up now). When France and Italy got hit hard by root rot, trade ended up happening with the U.S. as in people found roots in California and elsewhere did not suffer the same rot, so they grafted the grapes onto roots from the americas to ensure all of Italy/Frances vineyards didn’t die, in the trading it also led to California finding access to many of the grapes that were used in Europe, thus making it a very good grower of modern day wines. It’s how the world should work on my opinion, not about the profit side, but about the survival side and helping each other overcome devastating events that could change areas forever
if it’s cheese, it’s real, lol- like “fake boobs are real enough, if i can touch them they’re real” but the whole point of DOC or whatever regional protections Europe puts in place I think are about supporting the economies of the region as much as guaranteeing authenticity… the microchips make sense in that context… if someone can fake a wheel of parmesan and disrupt the supply, it will affect demand for the legitimate product and take a customer away from the region the DOC/DOP was meant to protect in the first place. Or just ignore me, honestly I don’t have a dog in this race and I’m not even 100% sure I’m right
Fair point, i have a bottle of 25 year old aceto balsamico in the kitchen with a DOP on it and I probably wouldn’t buy one without it.
But at what point does a counterfet become just as good?
In this case its literally just the geographical location of the factory that made it. I usually get the Aldi version of things where they just change the name slightly but it is otherwise the same thing.
Shame my local Aldi stopped selling grilling cheese as an alternative to halloumi though, its quite a lot cheaper and avoids having to transport food across Europe unnecessarily. If I wanted high quality I wouldn’t go for genuine halloumi either, there is a somewhat local farm that sells their own halloumi style cheese which legally isn’t halloumi but tastes way better than anything supermarkets sell that can legally be called halloumi.
I would rather buy the cheese without microchips
Yeah same tbh.
DRM: Dairy Rind Management
It’s more a self-defense measure - while there are perfectly good counterfeit cheeses out there, if someone gets a really crappy piece or there’s food poisoning traced back to a counterfeit cheese this lets them prove it wasn’t their fault, thus avoiding a hit to the brand reputation and/or avoid liability.
Not exactly a great solution imho, but it does make sense from a certain perspective. AFAIK they’re sticking the chips in the wax/rind not the cheese itself, which does improve things slightly.
Scammer reads p-chip patent, realises there’s only a small range of laser diode wavelengths that can penetrate cheese. Buys chipped cheese, breaks the cheese. Chipped pieces found using laser excitation pulse and sensor with a notch filter. Save the wedge with the most chips to repeatedly break down to get chipped cheese crumbs, insert into bogus wedges, profit.
I’m sure the idea can be refined, but I’ll leave the fine details to the dairy delinquent curd counterfeiters.
To embed the p-Chip in a Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese wheel, the chip is inserted into a casein label on the cheese wheel, which becomes part of the cheese rind during its preparation process. Cheese buyers aren’t going to eat this embedded label.
They’re not liberally sprinkling the cheese with microchips that can be picked out, they’re sticking single chips on full wheels.
Fair enough, read the tech stack more than the implementation. It makes me wonder why not RFID or NFC instead? The only substantial difference would be antenna size and visibility, my only hinch is that it’d be an appearance thing
I’m guessing it’s down to food regulations - I don’t think there are edible NFC implementations available (I suspect it’s down to the power requirements, as far as I can tell the reason they use light stimulation for power transfer instead of the normal inductive method is so that you don’t need the large receiving antenna, which probably makes it more “edible”?), even though it’s clearly the superior option.
Presumably the counterfeit cheese doesn’t have these chips. Therefore I’ll make sure to only purchase counterfeit cheese.
Probably cheaper too
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
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
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.
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)
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.
Ingredients: cows milk, salt, rennet, microchips…
Really? Cheese DRM? What’s next, they hit you with a DMCA claiming it’s nacho cheeze?
This is how many years old news?
A bit over 2.
Thanks!
This made my contempt for the microchip conspiracists curdle.
I imagine organized crime would probably be big into counterfeiting like that. It’s less risky than drugs, doesn’t bring as much heat. I know there have been more than one exposure of olive oil fuckery, mixing lower grade and other oils in. So counterfeiting fancy cured meats and cheeses would make a lot of sense. The Albanians, Calabrians, Sicilians, Sardinians, and whomever else, it sounds right up their alley.
I know in the US liquor counterfeiting has long been a thing, mixing in rotgut booze into fancy bottles. Done by organized crime. People have this romanticized vision of organized crime because all of the movies. But truth be told, they are pieces of fucking shit. They are parasites, they make things cost more and work less well. You pay more for less, and people get hurt, so those that add no value can make money. With the exception of course of bootlegging around bans on substances, in which case they do provide a valuable service.
The problem with parm is that “fake parm” can just be literally the exact same product, but just made outside the borders of the legally defined region, or even made within the region with the same methods, but not under the control of “big cheese”. It can still be a high quality product.
Counterfeit honey is a big problem. Honey is mostly glucose and fructose, which you can just buy. You can detect a lack of the pollen you’d expect in real honey, but that only makes it so that you can thin out real stuff. There’s other methods to detect it, but it’s on ongoing arms race. Buy honey from local beekeepers you trust, if you can. P.s., there idea that local honey helps with allergies is bunk because allergies are typically caused by windborne pollen, which bees dont collect.
Maple syrup has similar issues.
Seafood and truffles are commonly “fake”, as in substituted with cheaper stuff.
Not “counterfeit”, but a similar problem in Mexico is that the cartels have gotten into the avocado industry.
You just aren’t allowed to call it literally “Parmigiano Reggiano”, no one is stopping you from making it. “Reggiano” means “(of/from) Reggio (Emilia, a city)”, I don’t see why it’s a problem to forbid calling it that if it’s not made there-ish.
“Grana” is the generic name for that kind of cheese. Its use is not protected
I’m not making a moral statement on the rules. I was just pointing it out.
Also I believe “Parmigiano Reggiano” is a trademark name (i.e., protected) in the US and other non-EU countries, but other versions of the name, like “parmesan” are not. In the EU, you cannot call cheese “parmesan” unless it’s parmigiano reggiano.
Despite the fact that grana padano is widely available in the US, the style is still just referred to as “parmesan” even if it’s the notorious green cannister of pregrated “cheese”.
I make maple syrup, and much of it has wildly different taste, the only ingredient is maple sap, but it doesn’t all taste like the syrup in stores. I’m afraid when selling it I will be accused of faking it too, even though other producers will tell you that as well.
I do know someone that bought a gallon at a farmer’s market that turned out to be some nasty corn syrup abomination, guy disappeared. As to fake honey, honey has a particular taste, as does maple syrup, even the stuff that’s different, it’s more than just sugar, just as you can’t well fake fruit juice with sugar water. Mapoline is easily identifiable, I suspect honey would be the same, but I think your cases is probably more them mixing real honey with syrups and the like?
Because artificial flavors, known as natural flavors to the US government, (as they were naturally made in a lab from chemicals, after all isn’t everything part of god’s plan?) are a poor substitute for real ones, in my experience. Artificial strawberry, blueberry, Vanilla, mapoline, and so forth are all easily identifiable, and abominations to anyone used to the real thing.
From what I understand, they dont try to build syrup from scratch, it’s more that they cut the real thing with sugar and water. According to wikipedia, maple syrup is basically 2/3rds sugar and 1/3rd water, with about 1% “other”.
If you added the right proportion of sugar and water to real stuff in a 50:50 ratio, I’d have a really hard time distinguishing that from the natural variation in taste strength.
Luckily I have a steady supply from people I trust. I can’t get enough of the stuff made over a wood fire.
I make maple wine from it too, especially off tasting syrup, and also from the washings of it, when I bottle it all the goop on the sides of the containers, I wash it all into a mix and throw yeast and nutrient in there, sometimes spruce or white pine needles, yarrow, blackberry roosts, burdock root. None of which are that great, the spruce and white pine are ok. Nettle was good too, and a substitute for nutrient.
But that is really interesting in the types of tastes you can get from it, it’s very complex, but depending on the yeast, and if wild yeasts get in there. Then the vinegar mother gets in there if you aren’t careful, I’ve so much vinegar, way more than I can use I’m pickling entire 5 gallon buckets of vegetables with it.
Ever do an acerglyn (maple/honey)?
No, the word looks familiar but I never caught what it is. I really want to get bees but can’t afford it.
“Acer” is the genus name for maples.
The way most beekeepers make money is not selling honey (or wax). The biggest money makers are actually selling bees (in a package, nucleus hive, or full hive), or selling queens (genetics of a queen dictate the temperament of the hive). This is not including the huge commercial beekeepers who make their money off of pollination contracts.
This means that beekeepers are incentivized to get new people into the hobby, so beekeeping is very apprenticeship focused. Local clubs can put you in contact with someone while will be happy to show you the ropes (and give you a bunch of honey in exchange for the help).
To get started learning, all you really need is a veil and gloves (about $50 new total), but you may be able to get used gear for way cheaper. When you start doing hive inspections on your own, you’ll need a hive tool, smoker, and probably a bee brush (also about $50 total new).
If you want to get your own hives, the major costs are the bees themselves (which are way cheaper to buy through a club, like ~$100 last time i checked), and the boxes themselves, which can run a couple hundred for a hive. If you live somewhere with bears and/or skunks, you’ll want an electric fence, too. Usually, it’s better to have 2 hives, too, because if a hive dies in the winter, you can split the other hive and you are barely worse off.
If you are handy and have the tools, you can build your own hives to save money. Also, you can capture wild bee swarms by leaving swarm traps around during the right time of the year.
Lastly, there is specialized gear for harvesting honey, but usually you borrow it from a club.
Tl;dr, you can go all in to start by yourself for like $700, but you can get started as an apprentice for like $50 (or honestly just borrowing gear for free).
P.s., there idea that local honey helps with allergies is bunk because allergies are typically caused by windborne pollen, which bees dont collect.
It completely depends on the allergy
Just read the paper (well, skimmed is more honest). They cite 5 human trials. The first study was not blind, and it also did not show a difference between the control group and the treatment group. The “mini-review” author made it seem like there was an improvement to the honey group over the control, but this was not the case.
The second study, I can’t access. The conditions were a bit more complicated, so I can’t fully assess, but the “mini-review” author notes that they were also treated with olive oil and corticosteroids. Also, the group sizes were tiny (11 people split into 3 groups), which makes me highly suspicious of any statistically relevant effects. There’s also no placebo.
The third study seems legit from a quick skim. They placebo controlled with flavored corn syrup. At the end of the study, the treatment group does not have a significantly different symptom score than the placebo group. The fact that both groups improve is again misinterpreted by the “mini-review” author. In their defense, the authors of that third study really wordsmith their abstract to make it read that way.
The forth and fifth study both show no improvement due to the treatment.
So 4/5 studies show no improvement over control/placebo, and the 5th study i can’t read.
I did find a randomized, controlled study on birch honey which seems good, and it shows an improvement over a regular honey control. That’s not in the minireview.
Overall, if there’s 4 studies saying no, 1 saying yes, and 1 inconclusive, I’m going to take that as a no.
You ignored that the studies were all for different allergies… so you can’t just take 4 “nos” and 1 “yes” as a no for all.
The studies in that mini-review did not investigate different allergies. They each focused on different symptoms; either skin inflammation or mucosa inflammation (conjunctiva, nose, sinuses). The allergen responsible was not characterized.
The only paper that looked at a specific allergy is the one I cited.
I could also cite multiple studies showing that use of bee products can make allergies worse.
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/26/24/12074
https://www.jacionline.org/article/0091-6749(79)90143-X/pdf
https://www.jabfm.org/content/jabfp/7/3/250.full.pdf
There are more, too.
Someone else already pointed it out with a credible source, but since you haven’t edited your comment, I wanted to add another reply letting you know your “bunk” comment about allergies is wrong
Read my response to them. If you can find more randomized, controlled, human trials, I’d love to see them.
Counterfeit honey is a big problem
Why is it a problem? If you literally can’t tell the difference, what is the problem?
If the fake product is literally indistinguishable, I don’t think it’s actually fake. It’s the same product.
Like “fake” diamonds, which are actually literally better in every way.
‘Fake’ diamonds are not really fake, just synthetic, since they are chemically indistinguishable from real diamonds. Many (but not all) fake foods are not like this, since they have different core ingredients
Right, but in the case of honey, its (according to OP) not a different set of ingredients.
Similarly, parmezan cheese made outside the region can be literally the same, chemically exactly the same, but still fake, because of its origin. Just like diamonds.
If you make honey in a machine, and you can’t tell the difference, is it not honey?
If it’s chemically indistinguishable from honey then I’d say yes it’s real honey. It might be preferable to real honey for the same reason lab grown meat is preferable to real meat.
Ignoring the fact that selling something fraudulently is automatically bad, I can think of a few reasons. First of all, they can’t make it identical. They can beat certain tests, but that’s why it’s a cat and mouse game.
Second, even if it was 100% identical, there are still reasons to support the “real” thing. If I buy fake syrup, I’m probably getting something made from an industrial monocrop like sugar beets or corn grown far away. If I buy honey from a local beekeeper, I’m investing in more trees/flowers/etc. in my own area. I’m also investing against the widespread use of pesticides harming our whole ecosystem.
curdle
Hehehe cheese joke heheh
They are parasites, they make things cost more and work less well. You pay more for less, and people get hurt, so those that add no value can make money.
sounds like corporations who are also just making the products… not even talking about the bootlegged shit but the actual legit products. we pay more, for less… they hurt/kill people, these companies don’t add value to the world anymore. they are forcing costs to go up, while making the products also fail more so they work less well. Corporations are parasites
Shady trenchcoat figure on a street corner: “Hey kid, wanna buy some cheese? I got the stuff that’ll make you mouse for days.”
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.
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.
Big cheese was never going to let anyone else get away with a slice of their cheddar.
