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Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
The verses suggest that these names are simply identifiers for preexisting categories. But the categories were made for man, not man for the categories. The question is what's most useful. On the one hand, I don't think anyone is deceived by a term like oat milk (though I'd be open to evidence that people are actually confused by that), and it's taken off because many consumers genuinely do find it a superior product to cow milk for coffee. On the other hand, it was not milk as people understood it when it hit the mass consumer market (antiquated definitions notwithstanding), and if it were instead required to be called "oat emulsion," consumers wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole. That would have been a worse outcome for consumers, so it would have been bad to put restrictions around use of the term milk, at least for oat milk products.
My main decider for whether a restriction is good or not is how often consumers end up deceived, regardless of whatever other labelling exists on the product. I do know my dad has mistakenly purchased a "chik'n nugget" type product, so I'd come on the other side for that particular labeling.
I think there are particular ways companies can navigate this. New World winemakers managed to create differentiation from lower tier producers by respecting the champagne appellation.
I largely agree with this, the entire thing seems like a backhanded way of creating monopolies for yourself by making it impossible to make the product outside of pretty substantial limitations, and often from a very small region. If you can only use the label “Provel Cheese” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provel_cheese) if the product is made in St. Louis from local cheddar, Swiss and provolone cheeses milked from Missouri cows, then I’ve effectively created a set of conditions so difficult to meet that it’s nearly guaranteed to be made by only a handful of companies who are then free to manipulate the price as they please. If I only require that any such provel that doesn’t meet that strict definition be labeled to note that (made in Wisconsin, perhaps, or from cows in Idaho, or whatever) then it’s not deceptive and if there’s no actual quality difference between a provel made traditionally in St Louis from Missouri milk, and a cheaper but non traditional provel, then th3 public is smart enough to make that decision.
It's worthwhile creating these categories and monopolies because that's what creates the value worth imitating in the first place. Most of what gets sold in the US as "champagne" is not the genuine article, doesn't come from Champagne, and isn't strictly speaking the highest caliber. But people buy it anyways. And if there was no protection in Europe over what Champagne meant, and anyone could contribute a definition, there would be nothing worth ripping off.
But if the average consumer is not really seeing a difference between “real Champagne” from the right region of France made with the proper grapes by traditional methods and a California knockoff, then the value is basically marketing, people aren’t necessarily choosing the product for anything intrinsic to the wine, they’re buying a brand, and probably believe in the product because of the price and the legend of French wines especially champagne.
I suspect this is true of most such products— if I gave a blind taste test between the “real” version of the product and one that doesn’t meet the label standards I question whether the average person can really tell the difference. A lot of the perception of quality is based in expectation based on reputation, cost and marketing.
So I think it’s still basically a monopoly situation, aimed less at protecting the public and more about protecting European monopolies.
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Many completely new consumer products, dissimilar to anything that existed before with newfangled creative names took the market by storm. Of course, it was because they were better/cheaper/more addictive than natural product, something that does not apply so far to any of this "alternate" stuff.
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