The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, the saying goes. Although only mr. and mrs. Sarkozy-Bruni themselves could give a decisive answer to this subject, it appears almost impossible that love and good food did not inspire mr. Sarkozy to submit an application on behalf of France to add the French gastronomy (with classics like foie gras and soufflé) to Unesco's World Heritage List, which is reported today by Peter Allen on the Telegraph's website (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/25/wfrafood125.xml).

The heading of the article 'France seeks protection for trademark dishes' triggered my attention, because french gastronomy as a descriptive sign for the goods and services concerned would certainly not be registrable as a trade mark (however much French cuisine has an undisputed reputation world-wide), while registering for example certain tastes and food-designs are encountering technical registration problems. Of course certain names for particular goods (maybe delicacies would be a more accurate wording) are acknowledged and protected as geographical indications (with Champagne as an outstanding French example). And, indeed, food and recipes, could have a relevance in copyright (just a slight side-road: according to the Dutch and French courts perfumes - also to a great extent an influential French invention that is definitely a part of French heritage - could be entitled to copyright protection, so why not dishes and recipes?) and sometimes even patent law (a newspaper article I read on Saturday reported extensively on research of the Dutch company DSM which discovered that certain materials added to biscuit paste reduced carcinogens released during baking).

To be honest Unesco did not come to my mind to obtain protection for French cuisine. The list of Unesco does not seem to give rise to such protection, because there is an obvious difference between let's say French cuisine on the one hand and the Defence Line of Amsterdam on the other. But gastronomy is not an unidentified object for Unesco. A search on Unesco's website learns that a city can be a Unesco City of Gastronomy (the Colombian city Popayan obtained this qualification for its rich traditional dishes and ingredients that have rendered the city with a unique gift and resource in the field of gastronomy, allowing the city to attract major gastronomic festivals and events since 2003). It appears thus that a Unesco Country of Gastronomy does not seem to be so far away. Bon appetit!