Imagine people ordering a “lentil burger”, “soy burger”, “plant burger”, “bean burger”, or “chickpea burger”, and receiving a vegan meal.
Can you imagine how shocked and deceived, perhaps even violated they may feel? The horror!
Luckily the European Christian Democrats protected European citizens from this huge and common problem instead of, oh I dunno, helping European industry with the energy transition or end a genocide. They have their priorities straight here.
Or maybe, just maybe, this is another attempt by a panicked industry to slow down the transition to a slightly less cruel food production system and these politicians are earning some side money?
EDITED for tastefulness of words. The only words I changed are the only ones that OP quoted and responded to below. The rest of the message was ignored. I actually learned a valuable lesson today, thanks Felix!
animal mass murder industry
You vegans are so funny 🤣🤣🤣
Should I call it ecocide industry then?
Lung disease spreaders industry?
Epidemic production industry?
You don’t have to care about animals at all to see the benefits of reducing meat production.
Carry on supporting “plant mass murdering industry” a. k. a. “consumer deception industry” sweetie 🤣🤣🤣
Somehow industry producing plant pulp which looks like shit and taste the same way are hell bent on calling their inferior products the same as “animal slaughtering industry”. Try to guess why. Oh, hold on, that requires more than a few brain cells and you are a vegan after all.
Well, “sweetie”, I never personally insulted you and I took the effort to link sources for my claims so I got that going for me… 🤷
How have I insulted you now sweetie? I mean, “Vegan” can be perceived as an insult so I kind of get it - but surely not for yourself?
Regarding brain cells - that’s a simple statement of fact. Vegan diet, especially not properly balanced, impacts mental health and intellectual capabilities.
You are being very weird
You expect this from Texas but are shocked and disappointed when it’s the EU.
When has “burger” or “steak” ever exclusively meant meat from an animal? This sounds like political corruption to me. Somebody is getting paid for turning this linguistic gaslighting into law.
A “burger” has always been a mince patty of any kind and a “steak” is a thick slab of something. The default assumption may be meat, but it has never been exclusive.
Edit
OP appears to have a serious problem accepting facts. It’s disappointing given the number of upvotes Voyager shows for them. I suppose nobody is perfect.
I agree that burger has always been agnostic, but steak should really just be meat. Etymologically, it was always meat roasted on a stake. Similarly, bacon should just be a specific cut of pig meat, not turkey. Both of these are intentionally misleading marketing - with bacon it’s even so when they’re using different meats, let alone vegetables.
Intentionally misleading people through advertising, in order to get more sales, is wrong.
And don’t get me started on American “biscuits” that are not cooked twice. They’re savoury scones.
What about steak mushrooms literally their name, cauliflower steak, or something with a wooden steak in it?
After I posted this comment I looked up the etymology, the word “steak” literally comes from food being roasted on a stake. So, really, that should be the deciding factor - most steak we eat isn’t technically steak because it’s cooked in other ways.
Brazillian restaurants, the ones that come by with meat on a sword, should count as proper steak. Vegetables cooked in that manner could also be steak.
I mean… I kind of agree with you, but at the same time… Come on, the things have green packaging and “vegan” or “vegetarian” plastered all over the print. Not to mention they’re being sold in separate sections in stores, not where the meat is.
You need to really not be paying attention to get “tricked” by this.
No. The below are vegan sausages.
Show us an actual photo of that product and its actual packaging, not some random useless image from tesco’s website.
This is a photo of the actual product from the retailer website 🙄 Or perhaps you think the retailers falsify the photos of products they sell just for you?
Are they stored with the meat in the supermarket?
Or would you rather find them with the rest of the vegan products, away from the meat isle?
Are you for real now?
Was that a difficult question?
It certainly was a ridiculous one.
now i can’t get dino nuggies cause there’s no dinosaurs in them :(
If they’re made from chicken, which like all birds are literally extant dinosaurs, then yes there are!
It seems the meat lobby is way too strong. 🙄
They’ve been beefing it up for a while now.
They don’t mince their words!
Meat lobbyists forcing regulations on products that threaten the meat industry.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Nothing will meaningfully improve
It just did. European Parliament voted for regulations protecting consumers from deception used by the plant pulp industry.
Yay global warming solved! XD
/s
It’s insane seeing adults make these crying baby comments about not eating as much meat so we all don’t boil alive.
Throw out that pathetic ego, it isn’t doing you any favors.
It is. It would even be better if all the public lying was banned, not just this one.
Accidentally eating a vegetable, you poor thing!
It’s not about accidentally eating vegetables, it’s about products being marketed in a misleading way. If I order a pizza with bacon on it, I don’t want turkey, let alone a vegetable substitute.
However many terms are already agnostic, eg pattie, burger; these kind of things should be allowed. Also, “cooks like ground beef” isn’t a problem, however maybe the way the words highlight “ground beef” might be. Like, the “cooks from” and “made from plants” are white text on a light coloured background, as if to try and make it easier to miss.
There are already laws against intentionally misleading people with advertising. Done properly, this is just an extension of that, to counter businesses trying to get around the current law.
I have no problems with anything you say - as a vegetarian, Id also like to be able to distinguish between products and ensure Im getting plant based stuff.
However, you should keep in mind that this is not the actual intention of the meat industry pushing for this. Theyre just trying to fuck with the competition.
This be the type of person to drink Scheuermilch and sue Kinder Schokolade for child cruelty.
Fuck the meat lobby. Plant meat is the real deal!
I was going to disagree with you based on etymological pedantry, but it turns out the Old English “mete” just means “food” so now I have to agree with you based on etymological pedantry.
Plant meat
There is no such thing.
If plant “meat” is real, it would be part of the same lobby. It’s not meat. Just call it something else.
The terms burger and steak don’t describe the contents of the food but the shape. And the word meat, in English, doesn’t exclusively meant the flesh of an animal. So calling something vegan meat, or soy burger, is exactly the description a costumer would need. Anything else would be either a convoluted name or less descriptive.
I’m guessing they’re trying to distract people from the fact that they’re cutting back sustainability laws even further.
Great news! Hopefully the US follows suit, and does the same for milk and cheese!
Why…
So that I don’t have to keep spending ten minutes triple-checking packages of food every time I go shopping, ever since the time I double-checked that I was buying actual mozzarella, only to find that my cheesy bread tasted like plastic that evening due to misleading packaging and small print.
I want to be able to walk into the store, blindly grab packages that say “burgers” and “cheese” without having to take ten minutes to scour them, and not be blindsided when I get home by what I believe amounts to false advertising. Not to mention this will make it less likely that people morally or ethically opposed to meat and dairy products accidentally purchase those products.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it honestly seems like a purely positive change with no downsides whatsoever, other than to vegans mad that meat and dairy exist at all. The products will all still be available to buy, but will now be less likely to confuse consumers.
Edit: [Here’s] a great example from lower in the thread. You either have to have specific cultural knowledge that “Beyond” means “no meat”, or you have to check the actual ingredients.
Instead of this intentionally misleading garbage, you could have the large print actually say something like “PLANT PATTY”, and then the small print say “Compare to a chicken burger patty!” or something like that.
Idk, ive never seen plant based food that’s ambigious over whether or not it contains meat. Thats kind of the selling point of the product after all.
It feels like this law is just to undermine the competition.
I’m sorry, maybe your area is different and the packaging doesn’t show “plant based”, “soy”, “oat milk” etc prominently. But that’s just so far outside my experience I can’t imagine it.
The below is an example of vegan sausages sold in the UK - tell me it is not misleading with “meat free” printed in white on bright background:
I’m sorry, that image is too blurry for me to make out most of the text, regardless of the colours.
I tried finding the same packaging in higher resolution, but it doesn’t match what any of the product pages for frys I have been able to find.
I belive they used to be sold in one of upmarket shops in the UK. I don’t see them anymore on their website so they probably gone. But see another example - no mention these are vegan. In my opinion this is clearly misleading.
Omnivore here.
I say if you don’t even care what meat is in your sausage, meat replacement is fine too.
Whenever better-not-ask-mistery-meat is an acceptable option, meat replacement is acceptable as well.
If you’d buy that without checking the ingredients, you get what you get. Might be pig, chicken, goat, horse, beef, nutria, or lentils. If you don’t care, you don’t care.
That certainly doesnt mention its meat free.
Sure. Though, whether or not people care if there is any meat in “sausage” is an open question.
“Sausage” kind of just means “tube shaped savoury food”. I was expecting some specific meat to be mentioned. Chicken, pork, beef, lamb. That would have been misleading.
Good, product names should not be misleading.
Edit: I wonder what idiots think product names SHOULD be misleading.
I agree. Burgers should be called tortured ground-up cows.
Who is torturing you?
I don’t understand how that is the reply you went with. Why would a product having torture in the name be meaning it’s the torture of the person who buys it? According to exactly what you said above, it should describe the product, which the person you replied to followed.
I don’t understand
I know.
agreed - if this does pass I can’t wait to stop seeing “burger” as a term used to mean anything but the minced flesh patty and all uses of “burger” for the whole sandwich to be made illegal as bread, lettuce, tomato, etc obv aren’t made of animals
also I hope somebody finally starts enforcing this so we stop getting confusing product names like “peanut butter” - you’re telling me a peanut was milked and then churned? mm I don’t think so…
I assume you’re being sarcastic, but when I was growing up in Australia we didn’t call it peanut butter, it was peanut paste. Because the dairy lobby didn’t want the confusion.
Consumers readily know what a ‘burger’ is, and will readily understand that it is meat-free if ‘plant-based’ is used as a prefix to it. Plant-based burgers are intended to be substitute products for meat-based burgers, so disallowing the use of the word ‘burger’ will inevitably confuse consumers as to the nature of such products. Clear distinction is possible without directly favoring the meat lobby.
Plant-based burgers
*heavily processed plant pulp
Let’s rename burgers to heavily processed animal carcasses then :)
According to some definitions fish is not meat. What should a fish burger be called then?
According to what definitions?
Various holy books, I believe. See also pescetarianism, which stems from the same place
And culinary as well. And not without reason : fish has very different qualities from beef or chicken. Even leaving out the taste, you would never mistake fish for chicken.
And seeing that a mix of cucumbers and tomatoes are rarely seen as a fruit salad, or that people have a hard time calling a banana a berry, I think culinary definitions are important to us.
Various holy books, I believe
And why would anyone with a brain care?
You were asking for definitions, and I responded by pointing out that they definitely exist. The fact that you or I don’t personally come from a background which values those definitions doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that other people don’t use them.
And again, why would anyone with a brain care?
Why would anyone with a brain be confused or “misled” by words like “veggie burger” or “oat milk”?
100%. Misleading marketing is not the right way to encourage people to change their habits. It should not be.
To anyone dowvoting my remark, you’re more than welcome to tell me why/what you’re downvoting. At least, if by downvoting you wanted help me understand why there may be an issue with my comment. If not, don’t change a thing ;)
I didn’t actually downvote, but I do object to your characterisation of this as misleading. People aren’t labelling their products with the intent that the people buying it believe they’re eating meat.
Those labels are designed to communicate what sort of thing you can do with it. If you label something “burger”, for example, everyone will understand at a glance what they’re looking at, and that you might like to put it between two buns with some lettuce. It will also catch the attention of people who are looking to make burgers, but might not have considered non-meat options.
Also, common usage of words like “burger” aren’t limited to anything specific. People talk about “chicken burger” or “turkey burger” all the time, for example, and nobody accuses them of trying to trick people into eating chicken. Why not a “lentil burger” as well?
Okay, here I go: Heavily misleading marketing.
How the fuck do you look at a meat substitute product, which all scream “I AM NOT MEAT, I AM SUBSTITUTE” from the packaging to the naming conventions like “Like-Chicken”, and think this is meat. Please, if you do this, don’t do the shopping for your household. Depending on the language, you might end up with cleaning products in your breakfast cereal.
It’s just being brigaded by weird vegans it seems
I’m afraid you may be right. And if that’s how they envision convincing anyone to change their their mind, well, good luck with that. But I was still hoping maybe there was something else in my comment, something meaningful I mean, that was worth criticizing and discussing.
If there is nothing but a few random strangers on the Internet being displeased by a comment, well, it’s not like they will stop being triggered anytime soon, and I certainly don’t want to waste my energy worrying about them being too lazy to tell me what they disagree with, and why. So, like I said, they’re more than welcome to continue hitting the downvote button ;)
So how should a veggie burger be called?
“heavily processed plant pulp” will do.
So then a ton of animal meat products needs to have their names changed too “heavily processed animal pulp” too? Because that’s what they are.
Nope. They are delicious mince meat burgers. Which reminds me, it is Fri, time to have one.
Like “concentration camp slaughter” for animal meat?
Like delicious steak, medium rare please.
as opposed to “heavily processed animal pulp”?
No, as opposed to “tasty beef/pork/chicken/turkey burger”. You know, a natural product. Which reminds me of tomorrow’s shopping - steak tartare it is.
There’s not a damn thing that’s “natural” about ground meat.
*mince
I’m really enjoying all the angst this one is stirring up. I got plenty of things to care about but this one isn’t one of them.
Edit: The butthurt is real and strong.
You cared enough to comment.
I’ve seen “plant based chicken nuggets”, (0% chicken) which doesnt make sense
Good rule, food market stays the same, but these should be called “veggie nuggets” or whatever
I’ve seen “chicken-free nuggets”, which makes more sense IMO.
But why not include every other thing it doesn’t have in it?
Because if something is meant to imitate something else, consumers looking for such a substitute product should have an easy means of finding it. The target demographic of these products is people looking to avoid meat, so manufacturers already have an incentive to label them as being meat-free. Making them use meaningless words will inevitably confuse consumers more than a prefix such as ‘plant-based’ would, in turn discouraging adoption of such products by curious consumers, exactly the intended effect of the meat lobby that pushed for inclusion of the provision in the first place.
