“People can eat tofu or test-tube patties all they want, but it’s not meat,” said Céline Imart, a member of the European Parliament who represents a largely agricultural district in France, who proposed the move. She insisted that allowing non-meat alternatives to share terms with animal-based products could mislead consumers. “Words have meaning,” she said. “A steak is meat. Period.”
Proponents of alternatives to meat have argued that using such well-known terms is sensible, and that consumers are savvy enough to identify the protein that went into the products they bought.
A change in the law could cost Rügenwalder Mühle, Germany’s leading producer of alternative meat products, several million euros, said Claudia Hauschild, a spokeswoman for the company.
The company, which also makes one of Germany’s most beloved sausages, Teewurst, clearly labels all of its products, she said. “You really have to try to mix up a vegan schnitzel with a pork schnitzel,” she noted.
I LURV Rügenwalder Mühle’s Teewurst. The meat version, of course
This is just like the dairy folks who got their knickers twisted from almond/cashew/soy ‘milk’. Yes. Milk is the liquid that comes from the teats of mammals to feed their young. But almost any pale, opaque fluid is ‘milky’. Milkweed’s sap is like that. The Game of Thrones books call their opiate-like painkiller ‘milk of the poppy’. There’s “the milk of human kindness”.
This is a dumb take that has nothing to do with consumer confusion, and has everything to do with trying to kneecap a competing product by setting up artificial barriers.
When will people learn that trying to police language that way is like trying to nail jello to the wall? Language does what it does.
Good points, all. Makes me think of ketchup, which by US federal regulation, must be made from tomatoes. Never mind that there are other kinds of ketchup available on store shelves - banana and mushroom - and the the original ketchup was made of fish.
I remember some food-tuber coming out with a list for restauanteurs. Silly, rant stuff like “Your high top metal stools are uncomfortable and the Edison lightbulbs do not provide enough actual light.”
One of them, with a lot of emphasis, was:
“Nobody wants your homemade ketchup. They also don’t want any weird third party brand. If people want ketchup, they want Heinz.”
I’m really curious what they’re gonna call the non-meat soy-based ‘sausages’. Tofutubes? Bear in mind that when spoken in Japanese, “tofu” often sounds more like “tof” (the second syllable is unstressed and if you’re not used to it, it can sound as if it’s dropped), so maybe it’ll be ‘Toftubes’.
“People can eat tofu or test-tube patties all they want, but it’s not meat,”
When we stay at a hotel I catch a few hours of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Not for GF, just the food. If it’s a vegan place serving burgers, meatloaf etc. we always joke about how it takes a hundred and one ingredients to make it taste like meat.
With all those ingredients; no way in hell are you fooling me into thinking that’s meat. Then again, we’re gonna have a lotta leftover soy beans this year, so fake meat away! I have yet to try any that even echoes actual meat.
Cynical view alert: This is all in the name of people who just can’t bother with (or plain can’t) reading labels or learning what they’re putting in their bodies. I have strong opinions of food names being mis-used too (often in weird cultural appropriation scenarios), but I don’t need people to be regulated. I just need or wish for broader understanding and education. Trying to put laws around this that isn’t targeting clear deception seems like the worst waste of paper, time and energy.
