Lactic Acid Bacteria as Markers for the Authentication of Swiss Cheeses
chimia.ch
chimia.ch
I find the parallel with digital signature interesting because it uses a similar scheme: the "public key" is the presence/absence of a set of strains of bacteria, and the "private key" is a (secret) set restriction enzyme used to identify the strain.
(Basically radio carbon dating, but against a subset of a molecule rather than the whole thing).
I keep hearing about problems in food authenticity (e.g. fake olive-oil). I want the quality of my food to be auditable (is it really organic? Was it really grown in country X? Are these eggs really free-range?) and this seems like a step in that direction.
What scale do you want ?
It's already employed in Switzerland (the second part of the paper describe the result of a routine check from a supermarket). Switzerland is a small market, but not that small.
- list of ingredients - processing summary (was it reduced to a powder or liquid concentrate at some point frozen?) - list of growth locations for every ingredient, pesticides used - batch # - additional health information (PH) - What time it was made at the factory, and where
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426700 ("Parmigiano Reggiano makers embedding tiny trackers in rind to fight cheese fraud", 300 comments)
The thing though, I got to sample a Brie cheese made in Switzerland but I thought anything named Brie could only come from France?
Nevertheless it was the most amazing cheese I had, much more bouncy and not runny or flaccid like President or Kolibrie brand. I asked the staff where I could buy it but they said it's a local product from Interlaken. :(
Interlaken is, as the name implies, between two lakes, one of which called Brienz. Could have been "Brienz cheese" or something similar?
There is a sbrinz cheese that's made nearby, but that seems to be more of a hard cheese that's used more like you would parmesan.
Switzerland is not in EU so if that is protected by some EU law I think it wouldn't apply ?
But this is from the french part of Switzerland, I'm not aware of any well known soft chesse from the german part. But then small cheese production in not unheard of in Switzerland; you having it may be very well be in fact a local production (think nano-brewery, but for cheese).
[1] https://www.cheesesfromswitzerland.com/en/cheese-varieties/r...
Makes it sound like we're living in a cyberpunk future written by Douglas Adams.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insertion_sequence
> they may have more than one sequence and only publish one of them
In fact that's exactly what they do. From the "7. Risk of Duplication of the Proof-of-origin Culture" section of the paper:
> And last but not least, the proof-of-origin culture consists of more than one traceable strain.The composition of the mixture is changed (rotation principle) from time to time in accordance with the interprofessional cheese organization.