My law professor once said ownership is society’s most polite fiction. My culinary instructor once said a recipe is only ever a suggestion. Studying under both of them, I have slowly come to believe they described the same problem from opposite sides of the same cutting board.
Here is the paradox. In the US, you cannot copyright a recipe. In 1996, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Publications International v Meredith Corp. that a list of ingredients is a mere factual statement, and cooking instructions are functional directions, both explicitly excluded from copyright protection under federal law.
The US Copyright Office agrees: its own examining manual states plainly that a simple listing of ingredients or contents is not copyrightable. Your grandmother’s dumpling recipe, written on an index card, belongs to no one and everyone. Anyone may copy it, publish it, sell it as their own tomorrow morning, and the law will not blink.
And yet, three thousand miles away, an entire continent has built a legal fortress around cheese. Under European Union Regulation 1151/2012, a name like Feta, Parmigiano Reggiano or Champagne is not a recipe at all in the law’s eyes. It is a Protected Designation of Origin, a piece of geography wearing the disguise of a foodstuff.
When Denmark tried, for decades, to sell cow’s milk cheese under the name Feta, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2005, in the joined cases brought by Germany and Denmark against the Commission, that Feta could only ever mean cheese from specific regions of Greece, made under a specific method, because the name itself had never become generic. Danish producers, some of whom had used the word since the 1930s, were told to stop. Not because they had copied a recipe. Because they had borrowed a place.
This is the quiet insight buried inside two very different legal systems: law does not protect how you cook. It protects where you are allowed to say you cooked it. A recipe, to American courts, is functional truth, closer to a formula than a poem and truth cannot be owned. But a name, to European law, is memory made portable, carrying centuries of soil and patience that no technique alone can replicate.
I find this distinction more moving than most people expect a rule of law to be. Forced to choose what deserves protection in food, legislators chose neither the chef’s genius nor the exact sequence of steps. They chose belonging. A name like Champagne cannot be manufactured in Ohio no matter how precisely the method is followed, because the law has decided some things are inseparable from the ground that grew them.
For a culinary student, this should be humbling. Anyone with patience and a stove can learn technique. For a law student, this should be exciting. Few areas of law admit so openly that geography, identity, and memory are themselves a form of property worth defending in court.
The idea is not confined to Europe. The World Trade Organisation’s TRIPS Agreement obliges member countries to prevent misleading use of geographical indications, which is why disputes over Basmati rice, Darjeeling tea and Kobe beef keep resurfacing in courtrooms worldwide. Every one of those fights restates the same question in a new accent: does a word describing a food belong to a place, a people, or simply to whoever gets there first with a label printer?
The next time you read a menu boasting ‘authentic’ this or ‘traditional’ that, remember that somewhere behind those words sits a body of statutes and a Grand Chamber ruling deciding what authenticity is legally permitted to mean. Somewhere, a home cook is copying a stranger’s recipe without a second thought, entirely within their rights. And somewhere else, a dairy farmer in Denmark is still not allowed to call his cheese by the name his own grandfather used.
Food, we are told, brings people together. The law, apparently, decided exactly how far together we were allowed to go. It was not even the first fight over Feta’s name; Denmark, Germany and France had tried once before, in 1999, and lost that argument for good six years later.
The writer is a law and culinary student. She can be reached at:
