In France you can protect a book, a painting, but not a cooking recipe
Does a Pan Bagnat with chicken or a Niçoise salad with rice shock you? If you are attached to Nissarde cuisine, you have surely felt a pang in the heart when reading these culinary proposals. This is exactly what prompted the associations Collectif Cuisine Niçoise and Toqualoi to try to change the law to protect the recipes of traditional cuisine. Because’in France, regional dishes are not protected by any text. Franck Viano, from the Nice kitchen collective sums up: “In France you can protect a book, a painting but not a cooking recipe“.
And the first consequence is that on supermarket shelves, you can buy traditional dishes such as salad niçoise with ingredients that should never have appeared in the recipe. Defenders of local cuisine denounce a deception on the merchandise. This is the observation that motivated the senator of the Alpes-Maritimes Alexandra Borchio-Fontimp to take up the subject. “Cuisine is part of regional traditions and identities, and it is all these identities that make France“.
No legal text exists for the kitchen, you have to be creative, and this is the role of Me Thimothée Fringans-Ozanne, who deals with the legal side of the bill. It proposes a “sui generis” system, that is to say, created especially for this subject, based on patent law. A certification would be attributed to certain recipes, the reproduction of which under the given name should respond precisely to the established recipe.
Senator Alexandra Borchio-Fontimp first challenged the government with a written question. The bill for the protection of regional cuisines is being finalized before being tabled.