Cheese, chocolate and Switzerland’s cultural legacy

Switzerland is a small nation that’s not identified for too many issues. It’s bought its cheese, its banks, its mountains, its neutrality, its watches, its pocketknives and its chocolate.

If any of these is threatened — threatened with cultural appropriation, that’s — beware! The Swiss take these items critically.

That’s what accounts for 2 current crises, one over the labeling of gruyere cheese and one other over the packaging of Toblerone candies. (Perhaps you blinked and missed them.)

Let’s begin with gruyere.

Gruyere is, because the “Oxford Companion to Cheese” places it, “among the greatest of all cheeses.” It orginated in La Gruyère, a area not removed from the French-Swiss border, the place it’s been produced for nearly 1,000 years. A easy, delicate, laborious cheese, it’s made out of the unpasteurized milk of cows that roam idyllic pastures excessive within the mountains utilizing rigorous conventional strategies handed down via the generations.

But in the previous few a long time it’s been made elsewhere too. And the Swiss will not be joyful about it, nor are their neighbors in France.

At subject earlier than the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month was whether or not American cheese makers in Wisconsin, Idaho and elsewhere are inside their rights to make and label cheese below the identify gruyere — regardless that they’ve solely been doing so for a number of a long time, they don’t adhere strictly to the standard course of and the cheese they’re promoting isn’t from La Gruyère or La Gruyère adjoining.

The Swiss and French cheese makers mentioned, nicely, in fact they’re not. Bien sûr que non!

The Americans, for his or her half, mentioned the Europeans ought to relax and recover from themselves. The identify gruyere is generic, like bologna or frankfurters.

No one expects bologna to come back from Bologna.

Now it’s true that this dispute doesn’t have the importance of the conflict in Ukraine or the gathering local weather disaster.

But it captured my consideration. Bitter cheese makers combating an across-the-ocean battle! And there’s a good quantity of cheese at stake. Seven million kilos of gruyere had been imported from Switzerland in 2020 and virtually 40,000 kilos of French gruyere had been offered within the U.S. in 2016, in keeping with the courtroom of appeals. Millions extra kilos of so-called gruyere are produced within the U.S.

In the top, the American cheese makers gained the day. They satisfied first the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, then a federal district courtroom and eventually final month the 4th Circuit appeals courtroom that the identify “gruyere” has change into generic. Under the regulation, that implies that when U.S. customers go right into a retailer and ask for gruyere they perceive it to be a kind of cheese — not a cheese made in a specific area.

But I’ll exit on a limb and say I believe that’s simply the flawed manner to have a look at the problem.

There’s a precept at stake. It’s their cheese, not ours. It’s their custom.

By and enormous, Americans perceive that champagne comes from the Champagne wine area in France, and that if it’s from elsewhere, it must be known as “sparkling wine.”

Roquefort cheese has had a protecting designation below U.S. guidelines since 1953. Parmigiano Reggiano cheese additionally will get a certification mark just like the one the Swiss and French had been in search of for gruyere. Those designations make it a lot more durable for others to co-opt the identify.

So what’s gruyere — chopped liver? Why doesn’t it deserve safety too?

Allowing the identify for use by any previous cheese maker as a result of it has change into generic is round logic. Of course Americans don’t affiliate gruyere completely with the mountains of Europe — as a result of for many years they’ve additionally seen gruyere from Wisconsin and elsewhere on grocery store cabinets. Now that false branding has change into the justification for persevering with the charade.

It appears to me that 1,000 years should depend for one thing. Standards matter; traditions matter; names matter. If U.S. cheese makers need to make an identical cheese, nobody is stopping them. But they shouldn’t fake it’s gruyere.

But OK, sufficient about cheese. Let’s transfer on to a different dispute over Switzerland’s cultural legacy.

This time the problem is chocolate. Specifically, Toblerone chocolate.

Toblerone was based 115 years in the past by a Swiss confectioner named Theodor Tobler. The candies are so recognized with that nation that their package deal features a depiction of the nationwide flag and the landmark Swiss mountain, the Matterhorn. The candies are even formed just like the Matterhorn, form of.

But now, the chocolate maker has determined to maneuver a few of its chocolate manufacturing in a foreign country. It is being outsourced to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, the place wages are decrease and, presumably, chocolate-making is cheaper.

Who made such a choice? The present proprietor of Toblerone — Mondelēz International, an Illinois-based conglomerate that additionally owns Oreos, Trident gum, Tang and, till lately, Philadelphia Cream Cheese. (Hey, is that actually made in Philadelphia?)

Unfortunately for Mondelēz, the nation’s legal guidelines concerning “Swissness” permit nationwide symbols for use to advertise chocolate solely when 100% of the product’s milk and 80% of its different supplies are sourced from Switzerland.

So final week the corporate introduced that to adjust to Swiss regulation, the picture of the Matterhorn and the nationwide flag will likely be faraway from the chocolate field.

This subject doesn’t get me as exercised because the destiny of gruyere, however I have to admit I used to be dismayed to study that my go-to Swiss chocolate was really being made in Slovakia by an American conglomerate.

There are loads of advantages to globalization, little question. But on the identical time, multinationalism, commercialism and conglomeration have their drawbacks.

First the Americans appropriated gruyere. Now Toblerone has decamped to Bratislava. And no, for the file, Philadelphia Cream Cheese was by no means from Philadelphia.

@Nick_Goldberg