A video on EuroNews says there is a process called “geographical provincing” that detects an element signature of plants — identifies the dirt where it was grown.

Apparently this type of research is being done (funded?) to trace drugs like heroin and marijuana. Science Daily has a detailed story on how this started and the goals of law enforcement — police in Alaska wanted to see if they could prove that marijuana seized in raids was grown at lower latitudes, and to see if they could defeat a “grown for personal use” argument.

The drug issues are interesting but the title and script of the EuroNews video raises a whole new debate. It suggests that someone is thinking about using these signatures for other types of plants. They give the example of Darjeeling Tea, which has at least three times the amount of tea labeled Darjeeling than is actually grown.

Almost 40 million kg is sold as “Darjeeling Tea” when the actual production capacity is just 10 million. Most of this teas comes from Sri Lanka and Kenya and in an effort to stop this market a logotype is developed. Some of the fake tea is called Lanka Darjeeling or Hamburg Darjeeling but most of the time it’s called Pure Darjeeling.

Is there demand for authenticity? Most people eat unauthentic meals without worry. Consider Wisconsin cheddar in America. Cheddar is the name of a village in England where the cheese is supposed to be from. Courts have ruled however that the name is now generic due to use by imitators so you can basically call anything you want a cheddar. Feta cheese, which has been far less copied, can keep its protected status. With this in mind it turns out that America has formally opposed the use of geographical indicators:

The stakes for the United States are high not only because of the potential loss of generic names, but also because the country uses certain marks–under U.S. trademark law–to protect geographical indications. U.S. agricultural product exports are potentially threatened because U.S. certification marks would not be protected. GI protection would take precedence over certification marks, as indicated in the EU proposal.

Harm from loss of generic names? Wine and Spirits, under Article 23 of TRIPS from the WTO, seems to be the only category supported by the US but even that is not safe, as I have written before here and here. Budweiser, for example, was a name copied from a company in the Czech Republic that used it for five hundred years before America even existed.

Thus, while element signatures and authenticity of a product sounds great for consumers it probably will be tied up in a complicated international legal battle over generics and imitations. It could be fun to imagine tea kettles that would test and only brew authentic leaves, or coffee pots that would alarm on unauthentic grounds (pun not intended), but history says the market will drive more innovation in imitation rather than warm up to tools that detect what is “real”. Maybe if they marketed it as a tool to detect what is safe? Nobody wants a potato from Chernobyl soil. Then again it might make more sense just to detect contaminants instead of geographic location.