The notion of "authentic" food is a manufactured marketing gimmick.
There is always variation present, even from household to household, but for marketing purposes we now like to pretend that some particular food is always prepared exactly in this one way, with no room for deviation at all.
This is nonsense.
You're using the word 'authentic' to refer to what should properly be called 'traditional'.
For example. I was watching a few videos by Isaac Toups, a Cajun chef. Being Cajun myself, I was curious how he'd approach the cuisine. At first I saw a few of the things he was doing and guessed he wasn't from the Lafayette area, but in fact he is. So I watched his techniques more closely.
I determined his cooking technique to be authentically Cajun, but not traditionally Cajun. He incorporated techniques from his roots, to make new dishes. This is how we can have Cajun pizza, Cajun spaghetti.
Tradition is making what your grandma made, the same way she made it. Authenticity is making what your grandma would love to make if she were still young and spry.
It's worth discussing how authentic a restaurant is. Taco Bell is most certainly not authentic Mexican, and different Mexican restaurants can be more or less authentic even while neither make traditional dishes.
Restaurants can be purposefully inauthentic, I think fusion is as far as this can go while still remaining identifiabally ethnic. I recall a Neapolitan-style pizza joint that would put whatever you wanted on their pizzas that still had that crispy, charred crust. They didn't pretend to be traditional or even authentic. It was all about great pizza, and while it wasn't the best pizza in the city, I greatly enjoyed many meals there.
I think this comment is targeted at the wrong level of abstraction.
E.g. Obviously there is not one way to make cheese, but cheeses themselves are unique. Most of this argument is about how much variation is acceptable before it's really something different and should be labeled differently so consumers are well informed.
EU and USA seem to be at extremes on this, the former arguing that if I make cheese doing the same thing except for being 1 field west of a region, I shouldn't be able to label it X, while many American companies think they should be able to use different cows with different feed and different processes and quality control and still call it X.
I suspect there's a better middle ground, but not sure anyone will reach it.
