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food / travel

Doesn't The EU Have Anything *Butter* To Do?

The Czech answer to butter
The Czech answer to butter
Dietrich Alexander

The Luxemburg-based European Court of Justice ruled this week a product the Czechs call butter is not butter, which means that the beloved spread known as "pomazankove maslo" (“spreadable butter”) can no longer be labeled as such.

Non-Czechs would never have called it butter, which it bears no resemblance to – it doesn’t even really look like margarine. As chives, horseradish and paprika are often added to it, many would argue it was more like cream cheese.

But butter purists will be happy to learn the discussion is now moot, at least in the EU, because officially butter now has to contain at least 80% milk fat while the Czech spread doesn’t even contain 30% – the rest is sour cream and milk powder.

To say that the Czechs are not amused is an understatement: their take on the low-cost spread that has been produced since 1977 is that it is a "regional specialty." On average, every Czech consumes a kilo of it annually. Some 10,000 tons of it are produced every year – big business that the Bohemian-Moravian Dairy Product Association now perceives as threatened.

So now after years of legal wrangling with Brussels, it’s going to have to come up for a new name for the product -- "mlecna pomazanka," perhaps: it sounds similar to the old name and means something akin to “milk spread.”

Czech patriots, meanwhile, see the legal defeat as Czech culture being sold down the river to Brussels.

And their travails don’t end there. There’s also the matter of Czech rum distilled from grain and not -- as EU bureaucrats demand for the protected designation that is rum -- sugar cane.

No more "Tuzemsky Rum" is to be seen at liquor stores in the Czech Republic: only "Tuzemak."

These legalities "take bureaucracy to new heights,” one irate Czech citizen commented on the Internet. "The EU concerns itself with nonsense," grumbled another.

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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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