1y ago

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

Just a moment...

1y ago

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

7 comments

Reminds me of a semla(a Swedish pastry, and a big deal) competition Arla(cow rapists) had here in Sweden a couple of years ago.
The rules where you could use products of any brand and not just Arla, and the winner would be decided by popular vote. Rather quickly a vegan pastry shop got first place by a really high margin to second place. And just like that they got disqualified because the rules changed so now you had to use Arlas products..
The paradox of bigotry is always the same:
The enemy is weak and pathetic but also if they're not we must crush them.
Free market in a nutshell.
Good.
If you wanna eat vegan cheese-flavored protein loaf then go for it. I'm sure it tastes fine.
But it's not cheese, so obviously you can't enter it in a cheese contest.
- But it's not cheese, so obviously you can't enter it in a cheese contest.
  Except you can and vegetarian and vegan substitutes are explicitly allowed by the competition in question.
  See subcategories towards the bottom of this page: https://goodfoodfdn.org/awards/categories/cheese/
  It sounds more like they just never thought a vegan cheese would come close to winning. And when that happened, they planned to make a co-winner, if a vegan cheese was crowned first place. https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2024/04/27/vegan-cheese-good-food-awards-climax/
  Except the would be winner was disqualified, not for being vegan, but for using an ingredient, "kokum butter", which has not been categorized by authorities as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) yet.
  Kokum, for those wondering, is in the mangosteen family (Garcinia) and the fruit is often used as a souring agent in South Asian cooking. The fat from the seed, like cocoa butter, is used in cosmetics but is also edible and has culinary applications.
  I get that "rules are rules" and an ingredient was used that wasn't approved... But based on the activities like having a co-winner, leading up to the disqualification makes me think it's not the fact that it's vegan that's a problem, it's the threat and validation that a plant-based product could be great or better than its dairy equivalent.
- If it's made with the same process of cultivating cultures of the same microorganisms, then it is still cheese.
- Yeah, there's meaning and definition in words. I'm with France on this.

7 comments