I hear what you are saying and the Italian (and EU) laws on food authenticity are in general positive.
But the kind of person who would want to try to replicate this cheese for the challenge of it is probably just as likely to buy this cheese.
A business trying to cheat and mass produce this cheese with cheaper and less authentic ingredients that they can pass off as Grana Padano won’t be stopped because the video is taken down.
This is like suing producers of fan fiction to stop bootleg copies of the book from being sold.
One of my uncles picked it up about 5 years into retirement and inspired a few of us in the family to give it a go. I found it took more time and space than I have right now to do anything more complicated than a simple goat cheese. But it did increase my appreciation for different cheeses, though that was a bit of “pushing on an open door”
And yet we still have food such as vegan chicken, which “by definition” isn’t chicken. But it gives us the idea of what flavors it’s seeking to approximate without using chicken as an ingredient. I think that’s fair, unlike, say, “Just Mayo” which falsely implies that it is the purest form of mayonnaise without any extra ingredients rather than a mayonnaise alternative.
Thus, vegan parmesan, being a non-dairy cheese, seems a legit descriptor to me, in the same way that various meat alternatives can be described in terms of what meat they seek to approximate.
Actually the cheese that I am curious about is Suffolk cheese. It is legendarily hard and unappetizing. It was made in a region close enough to London that farmers could sell their cream there before it spoiled, so it was made with skimmed milk. It kept very well because of the low fat content, but was so inedible, that the royal navy eventually stopped feeding it to sailors…
I think technically if it’s not made in the Parma region, it’s not parmesan. If it’s vegan it’s not cheese. So you could make something in Parma and call it parmesan that’s not cheese.
Cheese is also good economics: if you can’t make a living selling milk because the commodity price is too low, you can make a living selling cheese, by the magic of value adding processing and marketing.
The cease and desist still seems to stand and the organization still asserts than even a disclaimer that mentions the name that must not be spoken in referencing the style of cheese is still a violation of their intellectual property rights, so much so that it triggered the notice of higher ups in the EU.
I am writing to you on behalf of the Munster-géromé Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée and Universal City Studios LLC, which are entitled to safeguard the designation of origin “Munster-géromé” and watch over the use and dissemination of all Munster/Monster puns.
In this regard, I wish to inform you that the above described conduct is a clear infringement of the Munster-géromé Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée and Universal City Studios LLC’s intellectual property rights.
In the light of the above, I kindly ask you to immediately remove any and all Munster/Monster puns you have written, disseminated or otherwise communicated or made available."
Yeah, no. The guy explained at the beginning of his video that he was showing how to make that style of cheese, which he had figured out through his own cheese knowledge. Further, he’s in Australia, and is not selling cheese. If anything, his work will make people appreciate the real thing more by understanding more about all the work that goes into it.
I think what really happened here is that someone got overzealous. In my opinion, the Grana Padano people owe this man an apology.
