Parmigiano-Reggiano makers are putting edible microchips the size of a grain of sand into their 90-pound cheese wheels to combat counterfeiters
(www.businessinsider.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 20 Aug 2023 08:00
https://lemmy.world/post/3483480
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 20 Aug 2023 08:00
https://lemmy.world/post/3483480
Parmigiano-Reggiano makers are putting edible microchips the size of a grain of sand into their 90-pound cheese wheels to combat counterfeiters::Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano makers are using microchips to verify the authenticity of their products and thwart scammers.
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The next time you dig into a bowl of pasta with freshly grated parmesan, you could accidentally be eating a microchip.
That’s because makers of Parmigiano-Reggiano are implanting microchips into the casings of their 90-pound cheese wheels as the latest move to ward off counterfeiters, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Parmigiano-Reggiano must be made in a particular area of northern Italy’s Emilia Romagna region and with specific production standards and techniques.
The microchip can then be scanned to pull up a unique serial ID that buyers can use to ensure they’ve got the real thing.
“We keep fighting with new methods,” Alberto Pecorari, whose job is to protect the product’s authenticity for a group that represents Parmigiano makers, told the Journal.
Parmigiano-Reggiano is among the many food products that are formally protected in the European Union, including Champagne from France and Feta from Greece.
The original article contains 324 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot!
My Parmesan cheese comes from Wisconsin and I think it’s good.
The more local cheese makers the better, as long as it does not call itself Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Maybe I’m a picker eater, but I think I’d rather have an inauthentic product than eating a microchip.
Hey, don’t knock it till you try it
You wouldn’t even notice.
I’m both cases.
I would!
points RFID scanner in their general direction
What if the inauthentic product is made by my mate dodgy Dave who got a load of cheap milk and some dirty old metalwork, it’s ok he flushed a load of industrial cleaner through them and it’s good stuff they use it to clean engines at his brother’s garage…
You’d be far better off not buying a prestige product and getting a good quality cheese from a reputable manufacturer at a price that doesn’t include a huge markup due to perceived historic significance
I mean I was being a little jocular in my comment (since this tracker is on the outside) it doesn’t really matter.
But by preferring “inauthentic” I was thinking something like “Greek style cheese” which is just feta but made outside of Greece or sparking wine for champagne. So food standards still apply.
But yeah, they are trying to stop fraudulent claims.
As long as Dodgy Dave passed his mandatory FDA inspections I’d eat his cheese.
You think the big brands don’t use industrial cleaner? LOL
But the point is if the labels are fake you don’t know if they got inspected, it’s organized crime gangs running it and they’re not really known for being sticklers for the law…
The cleaning products and procedures are heavily regulated in food production because when they’re not people cut corners and use cheaper things without regard for long-term health effects
Now you’re worried about counterfeit Dodgy Dave cheese? Where are you buying your cheese‽
It’s a supply chain issue, criminal gangs fake paperwork and all that stuff hence the cheese people going for more extreme security measures - you could be eating Dave’s cheese in an expensive restaurant, as far as they know it’s ligit but the importer or supplier duped them
There was a HUGE scandal in the UK over rotten horse meat getting mixed into basically everything. This was part of the whole Ikea horse meat story from years ago.
You won’t be eating any, read again.
I know. There’s an answer above where I say that. Writing a jokey comment doesn’t mean you haven’t read it.
Well then the right thing to do would be to edit your misinformation-spreading comment in this thread, don’t you think?
I’m not reading ALL of your comments
Haha no. Cause I read the article before I posted my comment. I’m not spreading misinformation.
The misinformation is in the title of the article. Report the article instead of going after someone who read it, and is obviously not talking about the article seriously.
It’s funny though when someone says read the article doesn’t read the one of the top tree of comments they are replying to where I explicitly say it’s a non issue 10 hours before your comment.
Maybe you want to edit your comment.
We are definitely not sorting comments by the same criterion, then.
Your other comment was nowhere to be seen 😉
Poe’s law strikes again
as other people pointed out, is a sticker on the outside, on the hard part.
unless you are very hungry and have good teeth, you will not eat it.
yet, since is applied on edible product, it needs to be edible.
The conspiracy theorists are going to run wild with this one.
If it’s just going in the casings, then it wouldn’t be eaten I guess?
.
Except for counterfeiters. They eat the whole thing to make sure their copies are accurate but now we can track their poops. I’m telling you, Mario, this thing is genius!
That’s why he was a plumber, to track our poop
I’m just picturing him listening to the pipes with a stethoscope
Dr Mario says you haven’t eaten enough fiber
They don’t read the article though so as far as they’re concerned this proves jet fuel can’t melt 5G COVID
Now I want to try it… 🤤
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/8ade9c49-128c-4566-876f-81ee959fad5e.webp">
So if you eat the chip, does it mean you officially become a wheel of cheese?
If you start eating packaging like stickers glued to the rind of cheese, I think you can legally be considered a kind of human-goat hybrid.
My networth would increase if you value the cheese-turned-fat at parmigiano market value.
No but you do become the property of a man in Italy
Depends if you have been a real or a fake person before… ;-)
Hmm, cheese ánd chips. Yummy
Nothing enhances that Mediterranean flavor quite like micro plastics
So to combat fake cheese, real cheese makers change their cheese and make them crunchier? 🤔
If the microchip just contains a unique serial ID you can check with the producer, it would be just as easy to print it in the casing or glue it to the side of the wheel, no need to implant it in the outermost layer of cheese.
It is just glued on it. It’s just on the label, not implanted inside the cheese wheel. The “you could be eating microchips!!!” part of the article is pure clickbait.
All they say is they’d be safe to eat if for some reason it ended up in the cheese. Like the rest of the label I guess.
It is glued to the side… The article is just bullshit.
I wonder how close they are to realm parmesan, those counterfeited cheeses.
Parmigiano Reggiano is truly something special.
There exist (cheaper) cheeses made in a similar style, but no serious manufacturer will call it Parmigiano Reggiano, or even Parmesan. Usually have their own brand.
Or you can make your own youtu.be/s1k1w7SnNEY
Worth noting that they use microchips because blind taste tests, chemical analysis, and any other comparison demonstrates that copies are indistinguishable - if you buy prestige food products you’re almost certainly just wasting money
Not necessarily. The insane level of protection applied by the original is the motivation to produce such good copies. Otherwise the copies would be just a generic “hard cheese”.
DOP/AOP regulations imo produce more benefit than harm, even by motivating copycats
I think the problem is more that they don’t want to have to do those things on every single wheel, the microchips make identification easier. Also worth noting that many things can be physically and/or chemically identical but still have different value due to the way it was produced, some things that come to mind are power and hydrogen. They can both be produced in many ways, with some in more environmentally friendly ways than others, and the consumer may care about that.
To save you a click (although none of the other commenters seem to have read the article anyway): The microchips aren’t embedded into the actual cheese that you eat, but are part of the label attached to the outside rind. Nobody will be eating microchips.
The COVID vaccines were a distraction; this is where the chips are really going
The microchips aren’t edible because they want you to eat them. They’re edible because they know some idiot eventually will eat one.
Assuming this is even real, someone is conflating the concept of “food grade” with being edible.
For fucks sake… This is literally about an RFID sticker that is put on the outside of whole cheese wheels.
So unless you buy whole 40kg wheel and then eat it with the rind… you are not eating any.
And also fuck that article for even mentioning that.
That makes it sound like the “edible” aspect of this is just an anti idiot feature. *Or just “printed” on it.
Either way, pointless article.
I believe regulations require that everything you put in or on food is technically editable. Like the paper stickers on bread or produce. They are disgusting, but if you or your child accidentally eats them, they are fine.
Those tiktokers eating the plastic around fruit chews are vindicated!
So I can eat the plastic wrappers?
Once?
I did eat those chicken wrappers accidentally at a buffet.
You can probably get away with it more than once, after all there was that one person who was addicted to eating plastic. I will say it definitely isn’t good for you to do it, so I definitely wouldn’t recommend it.
Alex Jones will yell about the headline and say Soros is microchipping food and if you eat cheese the 5g vaccine will do a false flag and turn the frogs even gayer.
I mean the top comment here didn’t even read the article to find out there’s no risk of them ingesting it unless it’s done on purpose after they purchase the entire wheel, they just read the headline and implied what it suggested without actually learning the full truth.
Alex Jones makes money on being a walking, talking “clickbait headline”. And people are so addicted to the dopamine they get from feeling “smarter” than other people (after being dumb all their lives because the American school system has been designed to fail them) that they huff his words like a drug.
Smug superiority is addictive.
You’re completely right, but it’s also highlighted when people on the internet discuss things they know nothing about but decide to become very sarcastic against “the other side.”
smug superiority indeed. many examples in this very thread.
Some recipes use the rind too, check this other comment here…
lemmy.world/comment/2658630
Haha no of course not…
lol right? I would never lol, that would be like, too much? Would it be too much? Honestly we may never know
It would probably last you a decade even if you really eat a lot of parmesan
You severely underestimate my cheese eating ability
I seriously love parmesan. I always buy it fresh and grate it myself. I know pretty well how much cheese is reasonable to eat in a sitting. 100g is insanely much for one serving, but you could distribute it over the whole day. If you eat 100g of parmesan each day, 1kg will be gone after 10 days. That means eating 40kg takes 400 days, or a bit longer than a year.
Being a bit more realistic easily allows you to stretch that wheel of parmesan over the span of a decade, even if you seriously love the stuff.
I’m perfectly aware that you’re not being entirely serious but I just can’t let it stand like that.
shifty eyes Yes, 100 grams is quite a lot. Yes. Indeed. Quite right.
When I was a kid we’d grate 200g for 4 people. I take a bit less nowadays than what I would get as a kid but some people still look at me funny. I think 20-30g is a regular serving.
Some people add the rind to broths.
If your soup or sauce sparks a little bit next time, you’ll know, lol.
Please tell me more
duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=parmesan+rind+uses&a…
From the top result (Treehugger):
You seems to be someone that don’t eat parmesan cheese.
This is like that Brooklyn 99 episode where everyone is putting microchips in Terry’s yogurt
TIL there’s a global market in fake cheese. Which is to say, real cheese that someone slapped a fancier label on.
I’m sure all the steps we took to reach this point were logical ones, but we still find ourselves in a very strange place.
Considering they charge arm an a leg for the damn thing no wonder. Also wait until you find out there are fake eggs mass produced in China. That will mind-stop you.
I’m concerned. At least fake cheese is real cheese. What’s lower cost than using hens to produce eggs?
Even lower cost, mass production, fuck knows. Am concerned as well.
You should pressure-wash your asshole.
Thank you for taking an interest.
Just wait until you hear about olive oil.
forbes.com/…/the-olive-oil-scam-if-80-is-fake-why…
Yeah it’s like how the Champaign region has brutalised it’s soil with over production and now produces substandard grapes compared to other regions but due to established customs can charge the most.
Cheese makes even less sense as the original taste was down to the quality of the dairy and the process of making it - both of which have changed totally and are easily replicatable, though fake cheese is potentially dangerous if made unlicenced because God knows what corners they could cut - I don’t want to eat something full of reminant cleaning products and deadly pathogens.
Really then avoiding over-priced prestige products is the best choice economically, medically, and morally (I’ll skip the essay on that but the main point is it’s funding greed and establishing a classist normal which is something we should be moving away from).
Legally it’s only cheese if it comes from the “Formaggi” region in Italy. Otherwise it has to be called “bad milk product”.
Why are they not using those nanotech microchip trackers that are small enough to fit in a vaccine, and that can communicate with a satellite without any need for a radio or battery?
Those chips are only good for mind control
The cheese is ruined when they make it magnetic, of course
I knew this was how Bill Gates would get us. Through our spaghetti and meatballs.
They found our one weakness.
I got to admit, Italians inventing Cheese DRM, wasn’t on my 2023 Bingo card.
Physical products are the only ones that makes sense for DRM.
You wouldn’t download rigatoni
Bolognese always clogs my fiber lines. Do not recommend downloading.
I would try really hard to do that
Good, 'cause you’d need to!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/watch?v=Y8ctere_8Bc&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Blockchain-based cheese DRM! 😂
DRM? More like DOC!
Cryptobros, Unite! We finally found a way for blockchain tech to be relevant for more than just ransomware! We authenticate cheese!
Someone’s gonna make a ton of money on CheeseCoin
Blockchain is also good for solving the Ship of Theseus problem. You can encode the entire history of the object into the object.
Blockchain has many cool uses and none of them are currency.
I mean, the ship of Theseus isn’t a problem, nor is there a solution, but I get the joke anyway :)
There was a joke in there?
There was a joke in there?
I thought there must be, otherwise it would be a deep misunderstanding of what the ship of Theseus is
I don’t know, can you make a JPEG of the cheese wheel and then put the hyperlink on the blockchain? Maybe make it so I can import the cheese in a shitty MMO that nobody actually wants to play?
It probably is, for ants
Blockchain =/= crypto
Crypto uses blockchain, but blockchain is just a different type of database that generally tracks data through a decentralized network. It has a lot of real uses beyond crypto like identity verification, transcript/records management management, and iot data sharing. It’s nothing that can’t be done in a centralized manner, it’s just a different way of going about it that, in some cases, is much more secure and/or much more easily accessible.
and thats the main problem with basically all blockchain related solutions, theres pretty much always a centralized alternative thats more efficient
and much more… centralized? But let’s also just ignore the part where it’s described as generally more secure as well.
The cheese makers are not concerned about decentralization. Presumably they trust themselves, because they are the only ones trusted to write to the database. If they are the only ones allowed to put something on the chain, it’s a central database, regardless of how many computers/places they run it on.
Blockchain is not magically more secure than any other equivalent cryptographic solution.
Most commercial non-crypto blockchains I’ve seen only have a couple of nodes connected, usually held by a single entity. In these cases it’s no less centralised than any alternative write-only DB.
What corporation which validates their supply chain for authenticity is not already centralized? It literally makes no sense when the official manufacturer and logistics partners are all known, at that point you may at best want “transparency logs” but not blockchains. They’re not even intended to stay authenticated on a second hand market, so there’s no need to be able to keep tracking their movements after first sale
it being centralized dosent mean its bad. theres also the fact that many processes are centralized by the nature of how they work.
why would that be?
It’s cheese!!!
Next up. Improve your wireless network with cheese.
Next up. Improve your wireless network with cheese.
Introducing: the Mish network!
Are we not all chipped anyways through the civic vaccine? /s
Thankfully countries voted to avoid that during the meeting of the Honda Accords.
If I run low on health and have to eat several dozen cheese wheels, will the authentic DRM ones provide a greater HP boost compared to the generic cheese wheels?
Actually an “HP boost” refers to using fake Hewlett-Packard ink cartridges that circumvent their ink-jet printer DRM. 😁
Hold up…
There is counterfeit cheese?
And olive oil and cigarettes and… Anything else really.
Have you not tried Velveeta?
Thank China for that.
Cheese that is cheaper and just as tasty as the original? Thank you china!
With a few sparkles of deplorable work conditions on top, delicious!
Don’t forget the melamine.
also known as American cheese …
You know, just FYI: Vermont white cheddar is “American cheese.” It’s not just Kraft singles.
Yea, many swiss brands have problems protecting their IP in America. Just recently Emmentaler lost its IP there, because Emmentaler describes a sort of cheese which is like our Swiss Emmentaler in America vs here in Switzerland only cheese from the Emmental is allowed to be called a Emmentaler.
EU has lots of protected origin products.
Wait till you find out about fake eggs (etc) in china
OMG! That’s what those crystals are!
.
What are you talking about, Jesse?
I use chilli powder as my signature yo
.
If I can make cheese good enough to pretend that it’s another brand, I’m gonna just slap my own label on it
You can make great cheese, but you can’t fake 900 years of experience and the brand recognition that goes along with it. That’s why people illegally put the parm label on cheese that is not parm.
It’s not a brand name but a regionally protected signifier. Like champagne.
Ah yeah the appellation system. couldn’t you just call it “Champagne-style wine”?
Can’t wait for the nutcases to come out of woodwork and claim this is a way to control the population 🙈
I guess in that case I should probably seek out the counterfeit versions of it since they’re now apparently better than the originals.
What?
Who wants to eat a microchip?
It’s in the wrapper not the cheese silly
Oh. Well then, nevermind!
Pecorino Romano is better anyways
Romano and Parm are not competitors. You would not make a Caeser salad with Romano. I mean you could, but the food gods will smite you.
Agreed. We can enjoy both cheeses but don’t put Pecorino on a Caesar. Love Pecorino.
its funny that some ppl are paranoid that bill gates is trying to microchip them with a vaccine when they probably already have been by the fucking itailians
if people who is eating them cant tell the difference than whats the point
Probably to protect the “brand” at places that actually care about advertising what kind of cheese they have
You really don’t want to buy counterfeit food.
Could you please elaborate on that
My friend, it’s food. You put into your body. Do you really need to ask why it’s a huge breach of trust?
But putting microchips in your body is ok? Seems to me the counterfeit cheese is now better for me.
I see your point, but both wheels are questionable in different ways.
Making your own product worse to own the counterfeiters.
This is like complaining that they changed the ink to print the labels with.
My biggest problem is that they’re claiming it’s edible and acting like it’s nothing. Like who are you to make that claim? Are you a toxicologist or a biochemist? Have you done ten years of medical studies into the effects of ingesting semiconductors? Got DOI link to a peer reviewed paper to support it being classed as edible? It’s “edible till someone dies eating it” as usual with these things. The food industry’s claims of “edible” and “safe” additives have been proven wrong far too many times (while knowing they were wrong to begin with and intentionally covering up that fact) to be trusted ever again. Just put a shiny RFID sticker on the outside that’s clear to the consumer that it needs to be removed and honestly it would be far less problematic, what’s even the point of hiding it inside?
It’s in the EU. There are rules about what’s allowed to be put in food.
Also don’t bother replying. I don’t like your pointless combativeness. Have fun with your blood pressure.
Its what the gaming and film industry have done for decades
It’s literally spilling into real life. Fuck this timeline.
youtu.be/R54EvuNXEbs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/R54EvuNXEbs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
One of the biggest reasons for avoiding counterfeit food is the higher risk of contaminants.
Semiconductors are a pretty serious contaminant.
I would rather buy the cointerfeit version of this cheese if that comes without microchips
OK
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/R54EvuNXEbs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
They make counterfeit Rolex so good, you need an expert and a microscope to tell the difference. Why not cheese.
It’s almost like luxury goods are a scam and purely for bragging rights of having the brand, and not that the actual object is unique or the best!
Great, now I can scan my poop.
Lol, cheese DRM. Just when I thought more DRM was impossible.
TIL that counterfeit fucking cheese is a thing.
Well one wheel of the cheese costs $1000
I know a bloke who’ll just squash a load of cheddar together for you for about 40 bucks. We call him big cheese.
Sure why not? Add to the delicious medley of microplastics and persistent organic pollutants, what could go wrong!
Jfc the people in this thread refuse to read
T h e m I c r o c h I p I s I n t h e c a s I n g n o t t h e c h e e s e