Bresaola is not PGI. «Bresaola della Valtellina» is

At the deli counter there is a pack labelled bresaola, and beside it a card carrying the letters PGI. It looks like information. It is the case where the acronym, on its own, asserts something untrue.

What is registered is not bresaola. It is «Bresaola della Valtellina», and European protection covers that string. A bresaola made elsewhere, from different meat by a different method, is a perfectly legal product that simply falls outside the designation. Nobody is cheating: the short name does not mean what it appears to mean.

The same holds for provolone, registered as «Provolone Valpadana». For mortadella, registered as «Mortadella Bologna». For burrata, registered as «Burrata di Andria». The generic term stays free, and anyone may use it.

When a consortium applies to register a designation, it files an exact name together with the specification that defines it: area, raw material, method, ageing. What goes into the register is that name, in those words and in that order.

The reason is practical. Protecting «bresaola» would remove from everyone in Europe the ability to call a salted, air-dried beef by that word, which describes an old and widespread technique. European law does not nationalise common nouns: it ties protection to a name containing a geographical reference, and it is that reference which makes the protection defensible.

You can see it clearly where the filed name is almost unusable at a counter. «Fagiolo di Lamon della Vallata Bellunese» is the registered name; nobody asks for it that way, so everyone says fagioli di Lamon. The distance between the two phrases is the distance between what is protected and what you buy.

We compared the name under which a page on this site presents a food with the name that appears in the register, product by product, across the PDO and PGI entries in the atlas. Twenty show a gap.

They are not all the same kind. In some, only a geographical reference is missing that most people would supply mentally, as with Cotechino Modena or Zampone Modena. In others the short name has entered the language so thoroughly that it has displaced the real one, as with mortadella. In others the gap is substantive, and the bergamot deserves its own paragraph.

For Bergamotto di Reggio Calabria the registered designation is «Bergamotto di Reggio Calabria - Olio essenziale». Not the fresh fruit: the essential oil extracted from it.

That changes what a purchase means. Anyone buying fresh bergamots believing they are buying a product under protected designation is buying a Calabrian citrus, which may be excellent, but the PDO covers something else. The specification describes an extract and its parameters, not the fruit on the stall.

Here the short name does not drop a piece of geography. It drops the product.

The practical rule is short. If a PDO or PGI mark appears on a label beside a short name, that mark is not stating anything you can check. The full name has to be there, because that is what the protection attaches to.

A second useful check is the number of the certifying body, which appears on labels of designated products alongside the European logo. It is the sign that someone verifies compliance with the specification, and it is not a graphic detail that can be added at will.

None of this means a product without a designation is worse. It means you are buying two different things, and that one of them comes with a document describing how it is made.

This is not a survey of other people's websites. It began as an internal check on our own pages, and what it found first were our own errors.

Twenty pages on this site carried a PDO or PGI stamp beside the generic name. The uncomfortable part is that in eighteen cases out of twenty the contradiction was already inside the page: down in the source notes it said in full that the protected name was a different one. This was not missing information. It was a page that never reread itself.

We corrected all of them, and every affected page now carries the registered name in full, both in the text and in the data search engines read. The worst case was ours too: pesto genovese carried a PDO stamp, and pesto is not a PDO. Basilico Genovese is, registered by Reg. EC 1623/2005 alongside Tuscia.

The method is repeatable by anyone: take the product name, look the designation up in the ministerial register, and see whether the string matches. Where it does not, the acronym alone is not enough.