For pastry read pasty throughout presumably.

It’s also amusing that amusing but accurate is inaccurate, since it should be amusing but inaccurate.

also, cornish pasty not cornish pastry

I think the Telegraph just wanted to give a bit of publicity to Cornwall, as their great white dope was on holiday down their. Predending to take his holiday in the UK, like last year, before he flew off to the Sun.

Sunny, I fear that you’ve not quite grasped the linguistic complexity here.

A swede and a turnip are indeed different root vegetables (although closely related).

But where it gets complicated is that which word we use to describe one or the other changes as you move around the country.

I may well manage to get this the wrong way around but up north (and certainly in Scotland) what we southerners call a swede is called a turnip. And what we southerners call a turnip is known as a swede.

So, for examples, those “neeps” that the Scots have with their boiled sheep’s stomach are in fact the orangey stuff that we call swedes.

That is what the problem is: not that foods which get protected status have to be made from certain things in certain ways (although the very idea strikes me as ridiculous that there should be “protected status”) but that the language changes meaning that what is a swede and what is a turnip changes across the country.

To the point where, if we were to have really strict food content labelling a Cornish pasty sold in Harrogate should have listed as ingredients turnips, while it is illegal to make them out of anything other than swedes.

Yes, it is absurd but then that’s what you get, absurdity, when you try to make such detailed rules centrally for 500 million people.

Yep, Cornish *pasty* not *pastry*.

Please amend before Lee has a coronary.

Damn my quick editing skills. Sorted now

Not quite Sunny, you still have Cornish Pastry Association in the line begining “A joint letter..”

Why is there a ‘Cornish Pasty Association’ anyway? Answer (from their website):

The Cornish Pasty Association was formed in 2002 by a group of more than 50 pasty makers based in Cornwall. The Association exists to protect the quality and the reputation of the Cornish pasty and to stop consumers being misled by pasty makers who trade off the value of the name without producing a genuine product.

This strikes me as recreating a medieval bakers’ guild… Basically, they want to limit production of a certain foodstuff to a limited number of people, including themselves. I am sure that we are all opposed to such monopolies of power?

The practice is hardly unique cornish bakers – there’s Champagne, Melton Mowbury pies, Kendle Mint Cakes, etc.

Shatterface,

And my concerns about cartels and closed shops applies to those as well…

Can’t find a Kendal Mint Cake Association (although there are apparently only three manufacturers, so that would be a cartel), but there is certainly a guild of pork pie makers (http://www.mmppa.co.uk/) and I believe that Champagne has its producers body also.

How is a body limiting production of a commodity of a benefit to anyone but themselves is quite an important question.