9mo ago

After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award, panicked dairy cheese makers forced the foundation to disqualify it

boingboing.net After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award, panicked dairy cheese makers forced the foundation to disqualify it

A vegan blue cheese won the prestigious Good Food Award, until the dairy industry forced the foundation to disqualify it with a rule-change.

Vegan @lemmy.ml

jdhdbdk @lemmy.world

9mo ago

After a vegan blue cheese won the Good Food Award, panicked dairy cheese makers forced the foundation to disqualify it

boingboing.net /2024/04/29/after-a-vegan-blue-cheese-won-the-good-food-award-panicked-dairy-cheese-makers-forced-the-foundation-to-disqualify-it.html

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Really, the disqualification is probably better publicity than winning the award itself. If someone told me some vegan cheese won a "Good Food" award, I would assume it was related to eco- and social-consciousness. Learning that it was so delicious that the dairy industry schemed to take away the award tells me they're afraid of the competition.
- When Seiko beat the Swiss at their own mechanical watch accuracy competitions, they decided to cancel the long running prestigious competition entirely instead of make a better watch.
  Capitalism breeds innovation!
  
  Same with Japanese Scotch whiskeys absolutely running the table on ones from Scotland in competitions.
  
  That's partly because "Scotch" is a protected label. You can only call a Whisky Scotch if it was distilled with a certain technique, from certain grains, by certain companies, and matured in certain casks for a certain amount of time. All of it is regulated.
  Japanese whisky doesn't have these limitations. They can just do whatever makes it taste good.
  
  If it doesn’t come from loch ness it’s just sparkling whisky
  
  Scotch whisky must be made in Scotland. Similar story with bourbon, bourbon must be made in the United States. In many places you can follow the same recipes and processes as those products, but you may not label them with those terms.
  
  Yes, but being made in Scotland isn't enough to call your whisky Scotch. There's a whole rulebook.
  
  Yes, and being distilled and aged in Scotland are both rules in that rule book. Again, same for bourbon, not all American whiskies are eligible to be labeled as bourbon.
  
  I'm an American, and we just don't really buy into the whole "you must be from this region to be called this item". All sparkling wine is champagne, all peaty whiskey is scotch, and all rice liqur is sake.
  
  You can make whiskey, though. According to the EU, if you have a product distilled from grain mash and stored, at full undiluted strength, in wood casks for at least three years, you can call it whiskey. You can produce a Single Malt Whiskey, or a Rye Whiskey, anywhere you want and in fact some German Korn would qualify as whiskey as it's aged long enough.
  Side note: Whisky wasn't always aged. Originally it pretty much resembled Korn (though German noses have some rather strict standards when it comes to fusel alcohols that Whisky and Vodka producers don't tend to have), then the UK prohibition came along and distillers had no choice but to let the stuff age in its casks while they fought the legislation, then they were allowed to sell the aged stuff, aged much longer than was previously common, and the rest is history.
  
  The Japanese distilleries are following all the rules. They are just doing it in Japan and better.
  
  Oh she's sweet but she's Seiko, a little bit Seiko
  
  Misread as Sekiro, was confused about sword fighting and watches, but interested.
  
  To be fair, a crystal clock is just going to be more accurate than a movement based watch. Even the biggest watch fanboys admit that a $30 ~~Seiko~~ Casio outperforms the majority of mechanicals on raw accuracy.
  
  Seiko makes mechanical watches that cost under $100 and are just as precise and long-lasting as a Swiss watch.
  You're probably thinking of Casio.
  
  Ahhhhh you’re right I mixed them up :/
  
  So... The existing market leader chose to flip the table instead of admitting that their position was weaker and lower value.
  Yep, that sure sounds like the pursuit of capital instead of... innovation, quality, or any of the other attributes capitalism attempts to associate itself with.
  
  The Neuchâtel Observatory is a publicly funded institution that certifies movements with high accuracy as chronometers. Not a private body, or a marketing tool used by a watchmaker. The same ‘competition’ is done by other observatories, all giving their own rating of a timepiece’s accuracy against a reference chronometer kept at the observatory.
  A quick search could have brought you that information_ Quartz movements beat the pants off mechanical movements, and they’re far cheaper to make, allowing the non-rich to have a decent watch with good battery life and serious accuracy. Cheap and normal mechanical watches regularly drift and lose a few seconds time over days and weeks - quartz drifts between 1-110 seconds over a year.
  
  They aren't talking about quartz watches though. Seiko makes mechanical watches that were being compared to swiss mechanical watches costing way more.
  
  So funnily enough, the very first movement they submitted to the contest in 1963 was a quartz, and it placed tenth overall. They went with mechanical movements for subsequent competitions, and didn’t actually start placing high again until 1966 when they placed ninth overall. In ‘67 they did even better, placing fourth, but then the contest was canceled for good the next year.
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- Yeah, well, you can't. It's only available to restaurants, and isn't ready for retail. That's one of the stupid reasons they can't have their stupid award. Stupid sexy cheesish.
  
  The username, the grumpy desire for vegan cheese. Perfect.
- I could have never known this award even existed if not for this news. I don't care at all for cheese and now I'm curious to try it.
  
  Same
  
  A Midwesterner that doesn’t care for cheese? Doubt.
- You're right, but it's understandable why the dairy industry shat themselves. They fucked up by allowing things to be named "oat milk" or "whatever milk", so they damn sure aren't going to let their "cheese" territory get encroached on.
  
  The problem with restricting the use of the term "milk" is that people have been using the term "milk" to describe non-dairy liquids for longer than there have been trademarks. The word hasn't ever been used exclusively to describe dairy.
  Here's a dictionary entry for "milk" from 1755:
  https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/milk_ns
  Note that it includes almond and pistachio milks.
  
  Milk of the poppy.
  
  Milk of Magnesia

297 comments