It really shouldn't be called "meat". It should be called plant-based protein or meat-substitute. The definition of "meat" shouldn't change because you press some soy to look like a chicken leg.
To be honest, this sounds like the same controversy as people complaining about almond "milk". I just don't see a lot of evidence that people are regularly accidentally buying vegan food.
Meat has been used to refer to non-animal products for a long time, particularly around nuts. I don't think that the definition has changed as much as people are using a commonly understood term to refer to a category of food that's all used in similar situations and for similar purposes.
I work with some inner city folk and yes, they are convinced it is meat, just really bad meat. As with almond milk, they think it is milk with almond added to it (even when I pull out the container from the fridge and show the ingredient list).
The issue is some people seem to assume liquids that are labeled milks are actually like each other in some way that goes beyond flavor and texture.
So I agree that different kinds of 'milk' have wildly different nutrition, but it's not really about dairy vs. non-dairy.
Vegetarian and Vegan Weaning of the Infant: How Common and How Evidence-Based? A Population-Based Survey and Narrative Review
Background: Vegetarian and vegan weaning have increasing popularity among parents and families. However, if not correctly managed, they may lead to wrong feeding regimens, causing severe nutritional deficiencies requiring specific nutritional support or even the need for hospitalization. Aim: To assess the prevalence of vegetarian and vegan weaning among Italian families and to provide an up-to-date narrative review of supporting evidence. Materials and methods: We investigated 360 Italian families using a 40-item questionnaire. The narrative review was conducted searching scientific databases for articles reporting on vegetarian and vegan weaning. Results: 8.6% of mothers follow an alternative feeding regimen and 9.2% of infants were weaned according to a vegetarian or vegan diet. The breastfeeding duration was longer in vegetarian/vegan infants (15.8 vs. 9.7 months; p < 0.0001). Almost half of parents (45.2%) claim that their pediatrician was unable to provide sufficient information and adequate indications regarding unconventional weaning and 77.4% of parents reported the pediatrician’s resistance towards alternative weaning methods. Nine studies were suitable for the review process. The vast majority of authors agree on the fact that vegetarian and vegan weaning may cause severe nutritional deficiencies, whose detrimental effects are particularly significant in the early stages of life. Discussion and conclusion: Our results show that alternative weaning methods are followed by a significant number of families; in half of the cases, the family pediatrician was not perceived as an appropriate guide in this delicate process. To date, consistent findings to support both the safety and feasibility of alternative weaning methods are still lacking. Since the risk of nutritional deficiencies in the early stages of life is high, pediatricians have a pivotal role in guiding parents and advising them on the most appropriate and complete diet regimen during childhood. Efforts should be made to enhance nutritional understanding among pediatricians as an unsupervised vegetarian or vegan diet can cause severe nutritional deficiencies with possible detrimental long-term effects.
> Almost half of parents (45.2%) claim that their pediatrician was unable to provide sufficient information and adequate indications regarding unconventional weaning and 77.4% of parents reported the pediatrician’s resistance towards alternative weaning methods.
> Our results show that alternative weaning methods are followed by a significant number of families; in half of the cases, the family pediatrician was not perceived as an appropriate guide in this delicate process.
In other words, nearly half of parents who try vegetarian weaning report that their pediatricians stop helping them or are unable to give them adequate/informed nutritional advice, and unsurprisingly, parents who no longer have adequate access to health resources and information struggle to raise healthy kids.
This isn't an argument against vegetarian weaning, it's an argument for educating pediatricians so they're not shrugging their shoulders when people ask them how to keep their kids healthy.
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It's also really important here to distinguish between vegan and vegetarian weaning. You're lumping them together when the paper doesn't. Its take is:
> Vegetarian weaning with appropriate guidance from family pediatricians or nutritional experts is possible and it should not be opposed.
> Vegan weaning should be discouraged because serious damages (slow growth, rickets, irreversible cognitive deficits, cerebral atrophy, and also death) have been demonstrated.
This is something that kind of annoys me when it comes up in these conversations. The health risks of veganism and vegetarianism are very different. Being vegan requires paying attention to your food intake, it requires doing some research, because the United States food system is not built around that concept. The risks aren't common knowledge and fewer foods are fortified to deal with problems that vegans face. But being vegetarian is comparatively much, much easier to do, and you're much less likely to make a mistake and end up with a deficiency if you go down that route. They really shouldn't be talked about as if they have the same levels of risk.
No, it’s an argument that people should probably listen more to their pediatrician.
If pediatricians are not properly equipped to guide through that process, then yes, it is a problem with educating pediatricians.
Health professionals need to be educated about what a healthy vegetarian diet looks like for children, because they are going to meet vegetarians who (very reasonably) are not going to accept an answer of "this is totally possible to do well, but I don't personally know how to do it, so nobody should do it." I think it's reasonable for the public to expect that those people learn how to address the health issues that the people under their care are facing.
I think your "other words" are deviating very significantly from the letter of the article and you're adding your own interpretation to what's actually written. As actually written, the article says that "the family pediatrician was not perceived as an appropriate guide" by the families Note the "perceived". This may be because the families have different ideas about a healthy diet than the pediatrician, for example "77.4% of parents reported the pediatrician's resistance towards alterantive weaning methods". Since those "alternative weaning methods" may include anything from a vegan weaning to feeding one's child beneficial moon rays (while simultaneously protecting her from the evil dark rays of death), I am inclined to believe that the problem is not that pediatricians are not adequately informed, but that parents are adhering to information from inadequate sources.
There are plenty of articles in the mainstream press by doctors who lament the fact that their patients will trust charlatans who sell them energy therapies and other such snake oil treatments, instead of the doctors themselves. Those doctors are usually specialists (for example, oncologists) but their patients still think the charlatans know best.
Instead, it literally says: "Vegetarian weaning with appropriate guidance from family pediatricians or nutritional experts is possible and it should not be opposed."
If the paper meant to say that pediatricians were fully up-to-date on how to give advice, and the problem was that nobody was listening to them, then it would have said that a lot more directly. Instead, it literally says: "Efforts should be made to enhance nutritional understanding among pediatricians as an unsupervised vegetarian or vegan diet can cause severe nutritional deficiencies with possible detrimental long-term effects."
I don't think a full reading of the entire paper supports the conclusion that pediatricians are perfectly informed and that vegetarian weaning is a snake oil con. It supports the conclusion that research is underdeveloped and that many pediatricians are not qualified to guide parents through that process. It does discourage vegan weaning because it's difficult to do correctly, because it can go very wrong if not done correctly, because we're still getting research about the best ways to handle those diets, and because, again, pediatricians and health experts have not studied these diets enough to be confident giving advice about them. This is not necessarily the same thing as saying that vegan weaning is impossible to do well -- it's acknowledging that we live in a world where it hasn't been scientifically studied enough to know the potential downsides, and where guiding resources are extremely scarce.
I think you're projecting a conclusion onto this that the authors explicitly reject. A paper that was trying to warn about the troubling trend of parents rejecting their pediatricians' advice would not look like this. It would be talking about things like combating disinformation, it wouldn't be spending half the paper talking about the best B12/iron/etc vegetarian food sources.
But it never goes to topics like misinformation. Instead, it lays out nutritional advice, warns against unsupervised weaning and the risk of naively eliminating meat, and then ends by reinforcing again the need for proper professional guidance: "alternative weaning as a self-decision should be generally discouraged. Pediatricians should guide families strongly willing to follow a vegetarian/vegan regimen, providing all nutritional requirements."
That doesn't line up with the narrative you have about this paper. Nowhere does it say, "pediatricians should figure out how to convince families strongly willing to follow a vegetarian/vegan regimen that they're being scammed/deluded."
> There are plenty of articles in the mainstream press by doctors who lament the fact that their patients will trust charlatans who sell them energy therapies and other such snake oil treatments, instead of the doctors themselves.
I'm sure there are. It's just, this paper isn't one of them and shouldn't be lumped into that category. If you're writing about energy therapies, you don't spend half the paper describing how to do energy therapy well and how we need more resources to guide parents through energy therapy, because it's not a real thing that can be done well.
I'm sorry, I don't follow. Who said that?
I don't think the paper supports that conclusion. The paper doesn't suggest that vegetarian weaning is itself a problem or a scam, it suggests that we don't have the educational resources available to support people who are doing it.
> I am inclined to believe that the problem is not that pediatricians are not adequately informed, but that parents are adhering to information from inadequate sources.
The way I heard that was, "the problem is that parents aren't listening to pediatricians when they tell them less-common weaning methods are a bad idea." Did you mean something else?
I'm thinking about that in conjunction with your original statement, which to me sounds more directly like it's making that argument:
> Yes, the problem is not dairy vs. non-dairy, it is with feeding kids who have been weaned a vegetarian or vegan diet in general.
Is that statement not saying that vegetarian weaning is a problem?
But if we're arguing past each other, I apologize. I guess I'm not sure what your claim is. Do you mean that pediatricians are informed, and they are giving adequate advice about how to do successful vegetarian weaning, and they aren't hostile to the practice, but that parents are just ignoring it anyway and trying to do weaning on their own? But this paper still spends zero time trying to talk about how to convince the public to trust their pediatricians, so that also doesn't seem like it's the conclusion that the author is going for.
Again, apologies for misinterpreting you, but if that's not what you're trying to say then I'm missing what you are trying to say.
Seems that it is made of peanuts.
I have no issues with "<plant> milk" products and labeling them like that, but people do get confused about their nutritional profiles, thinking they're substitutes for milk. They're not, and they're chemically different enough that they're not good substitutes for cooking. About the only thing they're good substitutes for is liquid milk, though I hear oat milk foams up well for a cappuccino.
By that logic, should 2% milk be allowed to be called milk? What about chocolate milk? Nutritional profiles can vary wildly between different brands and products, especially when we're talking about meat -- so where do you draw the line?
https://iheartintelligence.com/millions-of-americans-think-c...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
And yet, I remember reading (and could perhaps dig up again with a bit of effort) a study claiming that Greeks don't like to drink UHT milk and prefer fresh milk. Well, perhaps that's what they think but in practice most of the milk on sale (and so, very likely, most of what is consumed) is UHT.
Note: "fresh milk" is not raw milk; "fresh" milk means milk that's been pasteurised, but not ultra-pasteurised, and that's been knocking about the dairy industry's plants and refrigerated trucks and the like for about a week. "Fresh" is a misnomer. Even if it wasn't, people don't seem capable of distinguishing it from UHT milk anyway.
Bottom line: people don't know what they're consuming. Like, they really have no idea. Myself I hadn't noticed all that but it was pointed out to me by a friend who is a dairy scientist. In fact, I'd been drinking a UHT milk and thinking "hey, that tastes kinda sweet". I even kinda liked it. I mean, there's nothing wrong with drinking UHT milk! Don't get me wrong- it's just as nutritious as "fresh" milk. Except, I had no idea. This is disturbing. It makes me wonder- what else am I missing? What else is sold to me as one kind of food but is really something else than what I expect?
I mean, I would love if every product was clearly labeled whether it contained animal by-products, it would save me from having to read ingredients on everything. It's annoying to have to check to see whether a loaf of bread in the supermarket contains milk or not, or to have to search online whether some obscure ingredient is an animal gelatin. And additionally, yeah, there is a lot of confusion around buzzwords like "free-range" or "organic" which basically mean very little. You're right about that stuff.
But the words "milk" and "meat" are not part of the problem. It's fine if almond milk is in the milk isle and labeled as milk. Calling it almond milk-substitute would not have solved your problem with accidentally buying UHT milk, because "milk" itself is not a specific enough word to solve your problem on its own.
And to jump back to the original comment I was responding to -- "milk" is also not specific enough of a word to communicate what the nutritional profile is of the food you're consuming. Yes, there are concerns about people not knowing what is and isn't healthy and not being able to identify how food was produced and sourced. No, forcing plant-based substitutes to drop the words "milk" or "meat" won't fix that.
Anyway my ocncern is that most consumers are at the point where they don't understand the difference between animal milk and plant milk, or even animal meat and plant-based meat substitutes, because they're used to so much over-processed food that they don't recognise the tastes of ordinary foodstfufs anymore.
In the EU, you can't sell a concoction of palm oil, whey protein, fillers, flavors and colorings as "cheese" - you need to label it as "breakfast spread" or something like that.
There are different words you are allowed to use for fruit-based drinks depending on how removed they are from actual fruit.
Why not apply similar standards to the ersatz meat?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/16/eu-ban-v...
People aren't that stupid and the arguments against using the word milk annoy me. I think it's a sign that people are changing their diet and the dairy industry is worried.
https://www.google.com/search?q=I+can%27t+believe+it%27s+not...
People are not stupid to try to kill corona with disinfectant: https://time.com/5835244/accidental-poisonings-trump/
Well, calling plant mince patties "burgers" annoys me and I'm not the dairy industry, nor affiliated with it.
Can we leave the annoyance aside and have a reasonable conversation about it? Here's my concern: it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that everyone should eat less meat than they eat (or rather, not everyone; just the people in cough, certain regions of the world where "meat" is synonymous with "food"; that is really not the case everywhere in the world). But in that case, let's promote plant-based cuisines, like Indian or Mediterrannean, with dishes that can be cooked at home with cheap and healthy ingredients and that do not rely on the production lines of the same large agribuisenesses that are responsible for destroying the environment with industrial farming (which includes mass-produced meat- and plant-based foods).
https://uebermedien.de/57277/wie-man-eine-neue-schokoladenso...
It's likely enough they would apply to more specific terms, beef/chicken/pork, and so on, though.
I'm glad they changed their mind.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-lawmakers-set-to-vote-on-...
Hamburgers are named after the place they were invented (the city of Hamburg), itself named after a big castle which in German is “Burg”.
And before anyone suggests one could also argue that “they’re only allowed to be called hamburgers if they’re from Hamburg and otherwise are just sparkling fried meat patties”, I apologise for spoiling the obvious joke by having looked up the EU rules for when something can be protected with a geographical designation (feta cheese, champagne, etc.) and discovered none of that sort of thing would apply.
should we rename mincemeat since it rarely if ever contains meat anymore?
and what about hot dogs...those don't contain dog do they? do we have to rename those too?
It's hard for me not to dismiss these concerns are pure pearl clutching (or is it concern trolling? I'm not up to date on my internet debate lingo). If people really don't pay attention to the meat products they buy and they end up with veggie meat by mistake, there's a very good chance that they would've very easily ended up with some crappy ultra-processed low quality "technically meat" product instead. They might actually be better off with the plant option, quality-wise.
Are we even that there yet, seems like wide marketing died off after innovation in the space churned out one ground beef patty mcnugget meat product after another.
I don't mind deceptive labelling if for mass appeal. I do want meat substitutes that actually behave and taste like meat in more than ground form. It's not viable substitute for vast majority of cuisine from around the world, that's before even getting into delicacies like offal.
meat, n.
1. a. Food in general; anything used as nourishment for men or animals; usually, solid food, in contradistinction to drink. Now arch. and dial. green meat: grass or green vegetables used for food or fodder (see green a. 4). See also hard meat, horsemeat, whitemeat. meal of meat, meal's meat: see meal n. 2 1e.
a900: tr. Bæda's Hist. v. iv. (Schipper) 568 “He eode on his hus & þær mete [v.r. mæte] þyᵹede.”
c975: Rushw. Gosp. Luke xii. 23 “Sawel mara is ðonne mett.”
a1050: Liber Scintill. xlvii. (1889) 153 “Nys rice godes meta & drinc.”
c1175: Lamb. Hom. 135 “Ne sculen ȝe nawiht ȝimstones leggen Swinen to mete.”
c1200: Ormin 3213 “Hiss drinnch wass waterr aȝȝ occ aȝȝ, Hiss mete wilde rotess.”
a1240: Lofsong in Cott. Hom. 205 “Ich habbe i-suneged ine mete and ine drunche.”
a1300: Cursor M. 898 “Mold sal be þi mete for nede.”
c1380: Wyclif Wks. (1880) 206 “Alas, þat so gret cost & bisynesse is sette abouten þe roten body, þat is wormes mete.”
c1440: Pol. Rel. & L. Poems (1903) 185 “Thy mete shall be mylk, honye, & wyne.”
1477: Norton Ord. Alch. v. in Ashm. (1652) 76 “Without Liquor no Meate is good.”
1578: Lyte Dodoens ii. xlvi. 205 “These kindes of lillies are neither used in meate nor medicine.”
1623: Cockeram ii, “Meate of the Gods, Ambrosia, Manna.”
meat, n.
e. The edible part of fruits, nuts, eggs, etc.: the pulp, kernel, yolk and white, etc. in contradistinction to the rind, peel, or shell. ?Now only U.S. exc. in proverbial phrase (see quot. 1592). Also, the animal substance of a shell-fish.
c1420: Pallad. on Husb. iii. 708 “A stanry pere is seyd to chaunge his mete In esy lond ygraffed yf he be.”
1530: Palsgr. 245/1 “Meate of any frute, le bon.”
a1562: G. Cavendish Wolsey (1893) 30 “A very fayer orrynge wherof the mete or substaunce within was taken owt.”
1592: Shakes. Rom. & Jul. iii. i. 25 “Thy head is as full of quarrels, as an egge is full of meat.”
1613: Purchas Pilgrimage (1614) 506 “Of the meat of the Nut dried, they make oyle.”
1679: J. Skeat Art Cookery 30 “First take all the meat out of the lobster.”
1766: Museum Rust. I. lxxxiii. 370 “Low or swampy grounds don't answer well for potatoes,..the meat being generally scabby, close, wet and heavy.”
1802: Paley Nat. Theol. xx. (1819) 313 note, “The meat of a plum.”
1900: Boston Even. Transcr. 29 Mar. 7/3 “Force through a meat chopper with one-half pound nut-meats, using English walnut meats, pecan-nut meats.”
1902: Fortn. Rev. June 1012 “A bit of crab-meat.”
In other words, you’ve already lost this battle, and you’ve lost it in many languages and countries at once.
Whatever world you wish to preserve in which, for whatever reasons of comfort you insist that plant-based meat isn’t meat, no longer exists.
I have one question: why do people trying to eat only vegetables (is « vegetables » still ok?) insist so much to call that « plant-based » food « meat »?
That don’t. They just read what’s on the label and call it that. It’s preservationists who see a war here: everyone else has moved on.
If you’re into vegetables, as-in you’re against meat, you just eat vegetables and you don’t eat meat anymore. You don’t need that to be called « plant-based meat ».
Only the people who are actually so nostalgic of the good meat they had want something called « plant-based meat ».
Who are the « preservationists » there?
a: FOOD especially : solid food as distinguished from drink
b: the edible part of something as distinguished from its covering (such as a husk or shell)
Wiki: The word meat comes from the Old English word mete, which referred to food in general. The term is related to mad in Danish, mat in Swedish and Norwegian, and matur in Icelandic and Faroese, which also mean 'food'. The word mete also exists in Old Frisian (and to a lesser extent, modern West Frisian) to denote important food, differentiating it from swiets (sweets) and dierfied (animal feed).
If you want a burger, go eat a freaking slaughtered cow patty burger, don't be all fancy with that highly process crap.
I mean, we really are there?
If you make a barbecue party, do you discuss the new meaning of « meat » by the « I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about website »?
It's how the language works and I'm not sure why would anyone be against using the broader definition when it's useful.
I don't see anyone complaining about coconut milk and peanut butter.
For instance, I'm Greek and in the Greek language bread is synonymous with "food". A few expressions in Greek characteristic of this synonymity of bread with food are: "δεν έχουμε ψωμί να φάμε" - "we have no bread to eat", meaning "we shall go hungry"; "βγάζω το ψωμί μου", "deriving one's bread", meaning "making a living" (analogous to "bring the bacon home"); and of course "πάτερ ημών ο εν τοις ουρανοίς δωσ' ημίν σήμερον τον άρτον ημών τον επιούσιον", or "our father who art in heaven give us our daily bread".
This is one reason why debates like the ones in this HN thread frustrate me. Yes, some people should definitely eat less meat. Much less meat! But that's by far not everyone in the world and some people have been eating very reasonable amounts, very sustainable amounts of meat (and very sustainable kinds of meat) for many generations. Of course those are the same people whose national cuisines are already teeming with vegetarian and vegan dishes, except of course those are simply called "food" in the local languages. I find it an affront, having grown up in such a culture, to hear that I have to reduce my meat consumption even further or switch to repulsive-sounding "plant-based meat alternatives" because some people half a world over can't sit down to eat without a big fat beef stake in front of them.
Bottom line: we haven't all fucked up the planet to the same degree. We shouldn't all have to change our way of life and the way we eat to the same degree.