Culture Magazine

THE HOT LIS T 202 3 culturecheesemag.com 45 argument stated, specifying that "the other parties had no evidence as to how Gruyère is understood by a majority of consumers." On March 3, 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the USPTO's decision, putting what many saw as the final nail in the coffin of the Swiss/French hopes of protecting their good name. WHAT'S IN A NAME? Reading a summary of this case, you're left with more questions than answers— chief among them: What makes something "generic"? "A generic term is one that members of the relevant public understand as identifying the type of product rather than its source," says Jaime Castaneda, an Executive VP for US dairy lobby National Milk Producers Federation and executive director of the Consortium of Common Food Names (CCFN). "In this case, the court determined that cheese consumers in the United States understand 'gruyère' as identifying a type of cheese, rather than as a signifier that the cheese was produced in the Gruyère [sic] region." A term once protected as a trademark can become generic, he explained, if it ceases to bring to mind the source of the product but rather just a type of product (think: aspirin, escalator, linoleum). The music equivalent of this is the public domain— songs (and books, too) enter the public domain about 70 years after the death of their author. After that point, they're fair game for copying. "What they've done in Europe is they've taken generic names and made them non-generic, basically trademarking them," says Errico Auricchio, an Italian expat who runs the Wisconsin cheese company BelGioioso and has worked with Castaneda at CCFN. "[The Italians] claim that Parmigiano Reggiano has been made for a thousand years, so obviously it was generic before they trademarked it!" (Auricchio says he didn't get any legal pushback from the Italian PDOs when he began making parmesan, asiago, and fontina in the States.) "The excuse given is the geographical area, which doesn't mean anything; it's political," Auricchio says. "The geographic areas are not born by themselves, they were created." On the homepage of CCFN, a prominent credo reads: "Common food and wine terms—like parmesan, bologna, or chateau—are used on thousands of products around the world to accurately guide consumers to foods they know and love. Europe wants to monopolize these terms to unfairly stifle competition." But what CCFN describes as a monopoly is a tradition in Europe. AOC and AOP consortiums set strict production regulations for cheeses bearing certain names, an attention to detail one could argue is at least partly responsible for their global reputations and longevity. And here in the States, there's a precedent for respecting this. We don't, for example, let any Americans make a cheese called "Roquefort," and makers here must call their hard Italian grating cheese "Parmesan," not "Parmigiano Reggiano." I asked Kaser if "groo-yair" was a possible workaround. "We would not be comfortable with that," he said. "American cheesemakers should not be permitted to market their cheese as Gruyère, or any alternate spelling of that name." Castaneda feels this makes things tough for American makers. "Consumers look for parmesan, not 'hard grating cheese,' or for feta, not 'salty white cheese,'" he says. "Preventing producers from using names like those would put our producers at a significant disadvantage." In this scenario, a customer shopping for gruyère would pick up anything labeled as such, ignoring American products labeled "Alpine style" or even "inspired by Gruyère." This name-dropping (cheese's closest analog to cover songs) is already in use in many supermarkets. New Jersey's Schuman Cheese describes its Altu as "inspired by Gruyère," while Vermont's " [The Italians] claim that Parmigiano Reggiano has been made for a thousand years, so obviously it was generic before they trademarked it!" PDO, DOP, AOC, AOP… WTF? OK, so you've wrapped your head around why Europeans put letters at the end of cheese names— they're geographic indications (GIs), also known as quality schemes, designed to tell you you're buying the genuine article. But what do all the different letters mean? We made you a cheat sheet. ■ PDO—Protected Designation of Origin, the English translation of the European Union's GI, established in the 1990s when the EU was formed (prior to that, all countries had their own GI) ■ AOP—Appellation d'Origine Protégée is simply the French translation of PDO, i.e., the GI awarded by the EU ■ DOP—Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Denominación de Origen Protegida, the respective Italian and Spanish translations of the EU's PDO ■ AOC—Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, the designation awarded by French-speaking countries, such as France and Switzerland, to their products since around 1905 ■ PGI—Another EU designation, but one with less strict guidelines than the PDOs; in PGIs, only one phase of production needs to be carried out in the designated region PHOTO: ©Le Gruyère AOP

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