Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

This debate won't end in a hurry. We've been arguing about what beer is since the German beer laws and before. British Sausages cause hilarity in Europe. The idea that definitionally we can state a-priori what is or is not the current meaning of a term when language itself is plastic is kind of broken because the distinction between Cows, Cattle, Beef, Veal, Bison, Oxen, Bullock and Bull, Buffalo and Bison and Cow, Game or farmed, Fresh or was that snap-frozen, is endless.

Cut a "steak" off that plank, no no not cross-grain, I meant along the grain. Ok so nobody calls a plank a steak. but we do talk about "grain" in muscle and wood, and guess what, "grain" introduces legal nightmares when it comes to labelling cuts of meat, and wood.

A very cross-grained argument. Oh yea, "corn" and "wheat" are knocking at the door ever since english encountered the americas.

If we succeed in growing cell cultures from samples as in Kornbluth and Pohl's "Space Merchant" chicken Little (1950s) or Asimov's 'zymoveal' (1950s) what are we going to call it? Is cell cultured meat still meat and this is just an attack on the plants?

> British Sausages cause hilarity in Europe.

Honestly I don't really see why. Yeah the really cheap ones have a lower meat content than other countries tend to use, but german bratwurst are often around 85%(ish) meat, and it's very easy to find British sausages which have that much or higher meat content.

I think like many British food stereotypes, it's likely several decades past being factual, and probably has its roots in the post-war and post-rationing eras.

I don't see why either. I like some cereal in my sausage, I think it adds to the texture, and moistness, and I like the mouth feel of a blend of ingredients, but the relative % of meat and non-meat, for legal compliance with "sausagehood" is at root the problem. More filler-and-binder than meat? thats wierd. But.. legal.

Does it relate to rationing? I am sure it does. Remember the UK kept rationing to the 1950s and was not faring well postwar because the US cut off the taps, when the war ended. Rationing improved food quality for people on average, but there was a net decline in high quality inputs for a decade.

I am told by Uruguayan friends that what we eat in Fray Bentos pies, would not be acceptable sold over the counter in Montevideo. But that said, they are immensely proud of the link to the british diet!

Fray Bentos! I haven't had one of those in... more years than I can remember. Puff pastry, processed sauce and ... lumps :)

I've migrated to Australia (again) recently and the diet here is pretty British too. Fish and Chips everywhere, though with more interesting fish and calamari on all the menus. 'Servo' pies which are sold from gas stations and are about as bad as fish and chip shop pies in the UK.

Sausages (well, 'snags') are a big thing here too, though the default meat seems to be beef. This includes my fix of real bad junk, which I used to indulge in a couple of times a year, usually when hungover, a McDonalds sausage McMuffin. It's just not the same when it's not cheap-ass over-salted pork...

I don't mind some cereal in a sausage, but that said I really did get to like "Heck" and some of the other 97%+ brands.

> I migrated to Australia (again) recently and the diet here is pretty British too

I seriously think this misrepresents what most Aussie's put on their fork (or more likely their chopsticks). Go into any shopping mall food court, out of 20 offerings maybe 3 will be the McKFCKing chains, there will be a very multinational salad bar with a roast meat side, a juice bar, and then 2 or 3 Mediterranean style, a Mexican, and maybe 10 Asian (3 styles of Chinese, Thai, Viet, Korean, Sushi and a few fusion style). The final seafood will do your Pop's Fish and Chips but also a gazillion crustacea and molluscs. Supermarkets are full of international food sections, fruit and veges that just wouldn't be available 30 years ago.

Definitely 50 years ago it was very much plain lamb chop and 3 veg, but anyone under 40 almost certainly will be eating very multiculturally.

I'm not saying that's the complete picture, yes there's a great diversity of food here and heavy asian influences abound.

However there is definitely a heavy British influence, I know of only four countries on the planet that have fish and chip shops distributed all over the place like this (and not purely for tourists): The UK, Ireland, NZ and Aus.

I've got a friend in the UK who during covid decided to write a sort of allegory, sci-fy, children's story with heavy references to British culture - it's been one of the funniest things I've ever read. Anyway, in his story there is an "Isle of Fray Bentos" and he has a character named "Vesta Curry" so it makes me laugh to see it referenced here.

When you're in a culinary competition with Germany, you know you've already lost.

Kidding aside, don't think they're really known outside of Britain. You are probably bringing it up because at some point the EU objected to it being called a meat product because, at least then, a selection failed to meet the required (muscle) meat content (British sausages are very fatty). Precisely because words mean different things to different people, it is worth attempting to come up with a definition and then using it.

>"We've been arguing about what beer is since the German beer laws and before."

The Reinheitsgebot had nothing to do with a debate over what beer is and what it isn't.[1] The purpose of the regulation was to stop driving up the price of wheat up so more bread could be made and also to protects people from unscrupulous brewers using toxic additives in their brews. Everyone still agreed that thing was beer even if they had different preferences for the type of beer they preferred.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot

You're conflating metaphors with obfuscation.

For example, coconut milk is named so simply because it's a white liquid. It's not trying to be a replacement for milk, or trying to confuse people, it's just a metaphor.

But vegan milk, sausages, etc, are all meant to be as similar to the real things as possible so as to cause confusion.

Nobody's trying to confuse anyone though, they're trying to provide alternatives.

"Sausage" is such a generic term, covering so very many things, that it's bizarre to try and restrict it.

(edit: almost forgot we are talking about France, a country which tries to control its language by law. Carry on then!)

agreed on genericness. I have generally at least 2 options anywhere I go - sausage or turkey sausage, with the default assumption of 'pork'. But many places around me have (pork) sausage, turkey sausage, and vegan sausage. I don't think it's that hard, or confuses people (or, at least the people who care about vegan in the first place).

And you can have cured and air dried sausages.

> (edit: almost forgot we are talking about France, a country which tries to control its language by law. Carry on then!)

I get why this is controversial, but keep in mind that a lot of countries do that. English is the outlier here, and that's because it's not being threatened the same way other national languages are.

You're both completely right, and completely wrong.

You're completely right that French is far from the only language with a centralized linguistic authority. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators)

As a matter of fact, the United States is all in as a language regulator: they have a language regulator ... for Spanish! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Academy_of_the_...)

Where you are absurdly wrong, is where you say that the threat to a language is the reason for the existence of a language academy. It simply isn't; the reasons are purely historical for almost all languages. I mean, Cardinal Richelieu founded l'académie française. French was not threatened during the reign of Louis XIII!

French may be a bad example but at least some language regulation is actually nice, otherwise you end up with the dumpster fire that is English spelling. I say this as someone teaching two young children to read.

> "Sausage" is such a generic term, covering so very many things, that it's bizarre to try and restrict it.

In France various types of sausage are with protected names and origins ( e.g. Toulouse, Montbéliard, etc.), so usually sausage is a very precise term and you know what you're getting.

I think you are at least half right, but not entirely right. "cause confusion" is at least in part going to intentionality, where I agree the intent is to try and go beyond "its white" to "it has similar mouth feel, it whips, it makes a good coffee"

But Veal and Beef is actually similar. Rose Veal is most definitely not Veal. It was named Rose Veal to try and market what they do with slaughterhouses and with discard young from the dairy industry, to break from the old practices (male milk calves have low value. farming it for veal was how farmers made money from discards)

Rose veal is not veal, why did they keep the veal word?

Calling it "veal" instead of "baby cow" is intentionally deceptive.

What a strange idea. They are called vegan sausages because they simulate the flavour of and can substitute as a meat sausage.

> But vegan milk, sausages, etc, are all meant to be as similar to the real things as possible so as to cause confusion.

Source? I would assume they are as similar to the real thing as possible in order to be as similar to the real thing as possible. I.e. an alternative for people who do not want to source their food from animals, but do want their food to have characteristics similar to those that are sourced from animals.

Vegan meat products advertise that they are plant based. They are trying to taste, feel, and look like meat products because people like that.

For example this pack of ground beef says "Made from plants" in clear large letters on the front https://www.target.com/p/impossible-plant-based-burger-groun...

What confusion are the trying to cause

They’re meant to be the same in what we value about eating them but not the same in how they’re produced. Same taste, no death.

For a long time the taste couldn’t compare for any product. The fact that the pressure is building to keep the death part can only mean the taste is good enough for enough people that buying habits are changing.

I can see the protection of local business, and France has a strong farming and taste leadership history, but this change towards plant meat is inevitable and good for the world as a whole. Countries can innovate or end up losing this battle and only importing fake meat tech.

Who the fuck is buying vegan meat and being like "oh I thought this was meat"? Do we seriously need to legislate that? There's no real victim here, it's just a bunch of people who are sour or feel threatened by meat alternatives. It's ridiculous.

Just this week I bought two tubs of vegan yogurt by mistake.

They were the same shape, size and color as the milk based yogurts sitting all around them on the shelf. The only clue was the word "soya" printed at the bottom edge of the tubs in small letters. The kind of letters you'd expect to tell you something like the container size or the country the milk came from.

To be fair this vegan nogurt tastes almost the same as the real thing. But I did not appreciate being tricked into buying it.

I would love to start product line "Beyond Vegan" with tag line of "better than vegan food" with Vegan word being very big. And then have it contain lot of meat. Entirely honest and not in any way misleading marketing. And no vegan should be able to complain.

Perfect illustration! Thanks.

I think this is misleading in the effect is has. Omnivores still eat non-meat products, but the inverse isn't true and is in-fact pretty fucked up (if the person being deceived believes that eating beef is akin to eating dogs).

I agree that products shouldn't be deceptive, but this is a false dichotomy. More accurately the example should be "Beef Burger", then have it written in small "(dog meat)" as (at least in the West) even meat eaters don't like the idea of eating dogs.

Both beef and canine meat are from mammals. There isn't really much difference between those. Ofc reasonable labelling is reasonable to expect. But they are still meat and nearly every human including vegans can perfectly well eat either.

Same does not apply to companies that try to mislead people by calling something not meat meat or cheese or so on.

> nearly every human including vegans can perfectly well eat either.

If you haven't eaten meat for decades, you will probably become violently ill if you eat meat.

So like vegan products that have similar effects? And then some people don't even offer right diets to either group...

Hard disagree. I grew up vegetarian and after 18 years of such a diet I found myself in an environment where I had no choice but to eat meat in order to meet my caloric intake requirements (military basic training, so it was pretty damn low quality meat too -- and don't get me started on field rations (MREs)). I most certainly did not get sick.

Anyone getting sick is most definitely having a psychological reaction (i.e.: a choice) rather than a physiological one. As a young man out in the world on my own I quickly discovered that all the anti-meat propaganda that I was raised with was nothing other than just that. No matter what you're eating, a balanced diet is paramount. Everything in moderation.

> Anyone getting sick is most definitely having a psychological reaction (i.e.: a choice)

Thanks for letting me know!

Vegans are omnivores too.

They just happen to choose not to eat animal based products.

Oh wow, every time I see these laws about how "consumers must not be tricked into thinking this liquid oat-based product is in fact not bovine titty juice", I think to myself surely there is no one actually falling for this.

The viciousness in your comment makes it clear though, that it does affect you quite a bit.

I am veg and I recently accidentally bought and ate a real duck wrap because it looked (and tasted) almost identical to the vegan duck wrap.

However, I am just generally not very observant. I frequently buy sparkling water by accident.

> t's just a bunch of people who are sour or feel threatened by meat alternatives

Kast, a right-wing populist politician in Chile, made a big stink during his failed presidential bid over "Not Milk." He said only milk from "happy cows" should be promoted. These so-called proponents of the free market sure do hate competition.

https://www.cnnchile.com/pais/kast-critico-notmilk-necesitam...

Demonizing minorities, especially unpopular minorities, is not a good sign in a politician.

> so as to cause confusion

You got to be joking.

"Darn!, I was tricked into eating something that is healthier and better for the planet.". -nobody

> "Darn!, I was tricked into eating something that is healthier and better for the planet.". -nobody

Actually I'm pretty sure basically _everyone_ gets irritated when they think they're buying one thing, but instead get another.

Nut milks have been referred to as "milk" for nearly 1000 years in English and longer in Latin.

I don't think Apicius was trying to sneakily confuse non-vegans when he said "lacte nucis".

This is a very interesting point actually. Apple used to mean just any fruit in general as well. Deer used to just mean animal too.

But I guess arguably the question of whether confusion is being intentionally sowed has more to do with the how the the commonly understood meaning of words today than their historical meanings.

Maybe a better statistic is: how often to people buy vegan/meat products mistakenly when trying to but meat/vegan products. It's obviously not an easy statistic to gather, but it is probably a bit more tractable than focusing so much on language in particular. I've certainly made this mistake myself.

they aren't defining these terms, they are excluding vegetarian products. That's very reasonable.

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