How Sausage Laws Get Made (Very Fugly Edition)
Over at the invaluable To the People blog, Baylen Linnekin–not a nom de plume–fisks a recent call for protectionist laws by "traditional Cumberland sausage" makers in ye olde Englande. If you think regular governance is like watching sausage getting made, just wait til you read how unseemly the making of laws about making sausage get made (suddenly I'm both nauseous and hungry; is it lunchtime yet?).
A snippet:
Hot on the heels of British Sausage Week, bangermakers in Cumberland, England have formed an association in an attempt to use EU food-name protections to block out competitors who traffic in "lesser quality imitations" of their beloved "Traditional Cumberland Sausage".
The new association's chairman, quoted in a piece titled "Help Us Protect Our Traditional Cumberland Sausage," has "a simple message for all those [straw men] who, over the years, have demeaned, degraded and devalued the wonderful regional food speciality that is our Cumberland sausage: we're taking it back!"
Yeah! There's just one problem with the notion of "taking back" the Cumberland Sausage, though. Clamping down on competition and free trade entrails (erm, entails) having a pretty specific definition of a product and its history. But it seems Cumberland's sausagemakers haven't exactly an ironclad definition of what it means to be a Cumberland Sausage.
Read why here.