News and Features

Protection on a Plate

Susie Watkins Polakova

Once upon a time you only ate what you could cultivate or rear, enlivened occasionally with what you were able to trade with near neighbours at the local market.

Today the vision of limitless food choices is something most consumers take for granted. But for a small, but growing, group of producers, more choice is actually less ... and preserving foods that your grandparents and great grandparents made, and ate, is in fact progress.

West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers maintain a tradition that can be traced back to the 12th century and are now recognised and protected under the EU’s Protected Food Name scheme (PFN).  Chairman, Philip Crawford says: “When someone eats our cheese they know it is the way it really should be.  You can get great cheese in the supermarket, and this is the way of finding it.”

The PFN labelling and accreditation scheme has been slow to take off in the UK. It was established by the EU in 1992, but to date only 41 British foods are listed , compared to many hundreds in Italy and France.

The scheme has three status levels :

• Protected Designation of Origin (PGO) – whereby food must have been produced and processed and prepared in a designated place. This is the status of West Country Farmhouse Cheddar.

• Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) – when food can be produced or processed or prepared in a specific place, but which allows raw materials, such as the milk, to come from elsewhere. An example of this is Exmoor Blue Cheese.

• And Traditional Speciality Guaranteed (TSG) where a product has a traditional distinctive feature, such as some British turkeys which are fed and housed to strict rules and cannot be given antibiotics or growth promoters.

If the scheme is a throwback to a time when food was made slowly, it also requires patience on the part of the farm or producer to apply for the coveted logo. For example it took Melton Mowbray pork pies eleven years to gain their PGI status.

Critics of the scheme say there are lots of loopholes which producers can exploit to gain Protected status, that it simply allows food companies to increase prices and it doesn’t necessarily offer up any guarantee of quality.

But supporters say anything that educates the consumer and enhances the debate over how food gets to the table, must be a good thing.

The editor of the monthly food trade magazine, Fine Food Digest, which is mailed to over 6000 speciality food businesses, sees the scheme as a celebration of diversity.

 Mick Whitworth said: “The PFN scheme is about preserving specific recipes or foods that are part of the culture of particular European regions– which seems to me to be a good thing when we are faced with foods becoming more and more homogeneous.

You could argue that, morally, people have the right to continue eating the kind of local specialities that their parents and grandparents ate, rather than seeing those products destroyed by mass-market manufacturing and retailing.”