France prepares to ban vegetarian products from using meaty language
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The issue is that my wife hates the flavor and texture of meat; and the "plant meat" industry is really trying to shove traditional vegan proteins out of the way.
It's a familiar refrain for us to show up at a restaurant that used to have a tasty veggie burger, only to have the staff complain that it's been replaced with a "plant meat" that, to my wife who doesn't like meat, is just gross.
IMO: I think "plant meat" is an idea that's ready to die. I'd rather eat real vegetarian food when I eat plants, and cultivated animal tissue as sustainable meat.
I think they have both plant meat and real veggie burgers at different shake shacks, and I always look for the real one
This is very common. A lot of people just keep that part of the meat industry out of sight, out of mind. I'm not sure which is worse, ignoring the killing or accepting we are omnivores and making substitute foods.
Imagine Hanibal crafting some very convincing plant based fake people :-) I'm not sure that's an argument for or against...
I am not vegan (and yes I accept we are predators and kill other animal to eat their cadavers), but I also do like some of the vegan substitutes...but for the very reason they taste differently. They don't even taste close, they are all very far and taste closer to a lix of lentils and chickpeas than any meat.
And I don't need them to be named like meat, I am buying them because they are not.
I mean, you can't push beans and tofu out of the way, but you also can't make a big profit on them, so it's natural that companies are investing in highly processed foods; not sure what else you expected? It's great to have options to eat vegan junk food, not everyone wants to eat 100% WFPB every day.
There's not enough pure veggie dishes out there. I've been turning to Indian cuisine because they're the few options that don't have their entire veggie menu be "fake burger, fake hot dog, fake chicken nuggets, salad". It's like we can't conceive of eating a meal unless it has meat in it.
However, as an omnivore myself, I have no interest in the imitations I've tried— Beyond's fake beef has an oily odor that is extremely off-putting to me. When I want a hamburger, I want beef, and if I don't want beef then I'll have a falafel sandwich or tempe or roasted zucchini or slices of crisped up tofu or whatever other "authentically" vegetarian options.
> I see no problem in "oat drink" vs "oat milk"
Sounds like you think it's ok they forced the name change to "oat drink"
> milk also has a definition as "milky white opaque substances" which an oat drink is
Sounds like you think the name should have stayed as "oat milk"
The vegetarian sausage/patties and similar sorts of products do the reverse. They mimick meat products as closely as they can and relegate the vegetarian part to the small text. It's a basic truth in advertising/fraud thing. Obviously not a mind reader but sure looks like these companies are at some level trying to trick people into buying their product.
Yes. And the mistake can be fatal given some allergies.
What if you thought you were getting the same thing you always get, assuming the packaging only changed slightly?
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Field-Roast-Refrigerated-Classic-...
They relegate any mention of not being meat to the third most prominent text.
Hilariously they even split the plant based from the meat and cheese co with the intention to fool you. The text is:
(Small text) Plant Based
(Big text) Field Roast
(Small text) Meat and cheese co
Like they're not even trying to hide that they're hiding what their product is.
ETA: Contrast with coconut milk:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Silk-Dairy-Free-Gluten-Free-Unswe...
Any mention of "Milk" is like the 4th or 5th most prominent text. This is clearly a product that is not cow milk and doesn't want to be mistaken for cow milk.
It's literally called "meat and cheese co". You have to look above the branded and bold FIELD ROAST to see that it's a "plant based meat and cheese co".
You've gone from:
>Vegan products enjoy a healthy markup, and vegan stuff sells nicely. No producer is relegating the fact that their product is vegan to some fine print
To quibbling about whether clearly secondary text counts as "fine print". It's not an honest argument. To further illustrate, I never said "fine print". I said "small text". You're trying to shift my goal posts in order to find some fig leaf to be right.
Nah, the chain was:
Me: They mimick meat products as closely as they can and relegate the vegetarian part to the small text
You: Vegan products enjoy a healthy markup, and vegan stuff sells nicely. No producer is relegating the fact that their product is vegan to some fine print in the hopes to trick someone trying to buy animal meat
Anyone engaging in honest debate would look at the package I linked and see that it doesn't look like anything you describe. They also wouldn't say "No-where does it mention meat" and then completely ignore the fact that "meat and cheese co" is on the package when pointed out.
Yes, I was in Portugal this summer for vacations. I don't know the language and was shopping for groceries. In the meat aisle I saw a package and recognized the word for "sausage" in big so just bought some. Later at home I discovered that it was a vegan product.
I did not really mind, but the packaging felt quite deceptive. Obviously it's not an every day occurrence to shop in a foreign country, and it would have been solved if I carefully analyzed the products I pick; but I just wanted to get some groceries quickly. There were no illustrations that would hint to a vegetarian composition.
I am not some sort of traditionalist but the food industry hasn't regulated itself on things that deeply annoy consumers (given how retail shelf stocking works, consumers aren't the ones buying from food producers directly - it's the megastores). Absent shaking up retail business model, we need regulation so consumers' needs are represented.
Also was this actress they used just laughing at how ridiculous the milk companies were being or was she genuinely anti-milk? Not that it particularly matters.
So if that's a thing you only do every once in a while, you are a prime candidate for confusing advertising. You don't already know what the thing you want looks like, and you probably weren't expecting the ambiguity, because "meat" has meant one thing for thousands of years.
But yeah, that's why said it less of an argument, more of a fun fact. I honestly couldn't tell you if the regular supermarket I usually shop at has patties, I think not. The large one usually has everything though.
That's super funny that you wrote that because actually "meat" comes from Old English "mete" which referred to food in general.
The real issue is making the plant stuff look like the animal stuff and then naming it that way. That's just deceptive. In that regard most of the "milks" are fake.
There is also an issue around food allergies, which can actually kill someone. Don't forget to tell people your nut-based milk isn't just dairy. It's sad that we now have to ask what's in everything because the words are starting to mean nothing.
The same thing as in France has happened in the UK. Social media was inundated with tweed-wearing, flat-cap touting, Jeremy Clarkson idolizers who seemed utterly outraged at the idea of someone using "sausage" to describe something shaped and tasting like a sausage. Some so frothing berserk over the idea, that you'd think that plant-based food producers were planning to take these people's children in the night and make sausages out of them. Utterly unhinged.
It's Orwellian newspeak in a new form; just driven by lobbyists and think-tanks from the animal agriculture industry, rather than the Party. The language came organically and is being clamped down artificially. It's pathetic, and I despise the fact our supposedly "liberal" governments are backing into this pressure. People should be able to call their food whatever they want provided the ingredients are included on the package. No one needs "protecting" from this, and the value-add to society is less than the cost of ink that went into signing the policy; probably less that the computing power required to type this comment.
However, I don't think this sort of law that tries to proscribe for every situation is needed. The majority of vegan meats that I've seen have been obvious.
Or at least a product in Finland had to go from "voi"mariini to "oiva"riini a years ago. From butter to fine. And this product was mix of butter and margarine. (BTW, for my taste superior to butter).
Maybe we can call vegetable products that try to emulate meat: veat, in English anyway. There's probably already a term that has fallen out of common usage, maybe we can look it up.
Pronounced as wheat? Pick something else please.
The soft part of a fruit or a plant that you eat is also called flesh.
The soft part of a nut that you eat from inside the shell that you is called nutmeat.
In English we've used 'meaty' words to describe plants for over a century.
Should manufacturers be able to create entirely synthetic food that doesn't contain the core ingredient you might otherwise think it does?
You should, since "sausage" is the container, not the ingredient.
No they don't confuse them because there's nothing to confuse, they _are_ all oil, just different types.
Plant meat however, is not meat. I can absolutely imagine someone confusing vegan steak as real steak, because I see people do far stupider things on a weekly basis.
If you mean they don't care enough to check what they're buying, I'd say they care, and have "checked" to a _reasonable_ degree. This is the crux of this entire issue: The "reasonable" part is moving to small print, where as people are used to the words "steak" and "meat" meaning something different to what marketers are using them for now.
I've met people here in France who did not know what "vegan" means. They also have the word "végétalien" (as opposed to "végétarien"), even less known. So "vegan meat" might not register with a lot of folks.
Joking aside, I need to see if I can make spicy bean burgers at home — they were a thing back in the UK that I can't seem to find since moving.
I wouldn't call myself a vegetarian per se, but I've explored more foods without meat in the past years, and it's been quite pleasant! Actually, even when I was a student, this burger chain that we have here had what they call VEKE burgers, which were also somehow cheaper than burgers with meat, and also tasty: https://www.hesburger.com/products/hamburgers/veke---cheese-...
I actually tried making some bean burgers myself recently - which went pretty okay for an experiment. You do need something that adds a bit of a crunch in the recipe though, like some bread crumbs on the outside, and things can be a bit dry depending on how you make them, so adding onion, tomato, cucumbers etc. to the burger itself in ample amounts is also a good idea!
Can't really talk about France or the naming idea in the article, but exploring all sorts of foods is nice! Even the plant based "milk" varieties are interesting, especially since regular lactose free milk isn't something you always find over here, at least not in all stores.
Ahh I too have fond memories of Wimpy/Burger King Spicy Bean Burgers
I'd be really interested in meeting someone who was legitimately confused by the notion vegetarian meat.
How poor would someone's lateral thinking skills need to be that they can't manage to square "vegetarian meat" on the fly?
They'll be demanding that they take a separate section in the back of the supermarket next. Then, lobbying to make sure that a certain percentage of plants grown must go to animal agriculture for "tradition and heritage" or some such shite. I'm sure banning plant-based meat alternatives is somewhere on the wish list too.
Auf Wiedersehen Schnitzel: Meat consumption hits record low in Germany
More and more Germans are swapping meat products for plant-based proteins, according to Germany's Ministry for Agriculture, but not everyone is ready to give them up.
Today 10 per cent of Germans opt for plant-based foods compared to six per cent in 2018.
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00347-...
Public policies and vested interests preserve the animal farming status quo at the expense of animal product analogs
Best report I can find with data listed is from the Boston Consulting Group: https://web-assets.bcg.com/a0/28/4295860343c6a2a5b9f4e343611...
> How poor would someone's lateral thinking skills need to be that they can't manage to square "vegetarian meat" on the fly?
Of course you have to insult the victims so we don't show up, but I don't care if people think I'm a moron.
The botulism outbreak of the 1920 gave rise to the US's food and safety system. People called those who consumed those cans and died idiots too, because contaminated cans swell up, so imagine how "how poor would someone's lateral thinking skills need to be that they can't manage" to figure out that swollen cans are dangerous.
But that incident led to better food safety. Society advances with every man that gets called an idiot.
You can +1 me to your lonely list, and I don't care either.
Nobody seems to actually be confused into thinking these products came from an animal, though, and the labeling does not seem to be designed to fool anyone. If the taste is designed to mimic a cow burger, then calling it a burger is genuinely descriptive.
When I point this out though, people just switch gears and start making up other arguments instead. The emotional response seems to be coming from somewhere else, but I haven't figured out where.
Meanwhile, hamburgers aren't burgers made from ham, and milk is a word used to describe a liquid available from several animal and plant sources.
People are losing their minds over trivial nonsense. It's the phenomenon of our time.
Perhaps I don't care enough either way. Even if the metaphysics of language different such that words could only ever have one very specific immutable meaning, I can't imaging caring enough that I would object to something being referred to as "oat milk."
There is something to be said for basic truth in advertising law, though. There is a fundamental difference in quality between what meets the requirements for "ice cream", "frozen dairy dessert", and "frozen dessert".
Right? Who wouldn't go for some city-raised[1] pork?
(A clarification, to reduce confusion for readers not well-acquainted with Western meat dishes: Hamburgers are named after the city of Hamburg, and are always made from beef.)
Multiple people here have, presumably because it is
I wonder what is the approved alternative for grilled vegetables.
GRILLADE, noun, feminine A. The act of grilling. "One also had to endure the smell of the kitchen, the heavy scent of wine in the sauces, the nauseating grilling of onions in the frying pan" (HUYSMANS, Marthe, 1876, p. 62).
http://stella.atilf.fr/Dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/visusel.exe?12...
Also anecdotally as a French native, grillade = meat for me.
However what's discussed here is a case of legislators deciding what shape language should take, not usage !
That’s not that simple. The English word "grill" comes from the French "gril", a word that has been in used for more than a millenary. Only the orthography "grill" with two "l"s comes from English, but the rest is plain old French. It also makes sense: "gril" comes from "grille", which also gave "griller".
- Grill => noun => Grillade
On a serious note, an obvious solution to prevent consumers from being confused in their tiny little precious heads is a EU-wide standard vegan/vegetarian label and make it mandatory in any vegetarian analogues. But of course this isn't about consumers at all, no one ever bought a vegan patty thinking they were buying beef.
I know people who did, but this is a crime? You cannot read and think properly, maybe you should not be allowed out?
I bought vegan sausages thinking they were real. They were placed next to real sausages and I thought I should try something new.
I'm sure geniuses like you always read the full packaging before buying but poor untermenschen like me need protection from capitalists who sell us vegan poison.
But of course you would oppose that, because if consumers made informed choices hardly anyone would buy vegan stuff.
It's the reason people sell shoes labeled Niko or Abibas.
Arbitrary nonsense serves no one except those paid to put it in place.
The rainforest is burning (or rather it's being burned) so that the world can have more and more beef. We cannot sustain the entire world having a Western diet of way too much animal protein. And I say that as a guy who loves a good steak. We need to cut back, and we'd be healthier if we did.
I truly want to see a world where plant-based is cheaper and tastes even better than real meat.
Why oh why does France want to fight this? No one is being 'fooled'. It's just a meat industry lobbying law to fight competition.
> We need to cut back, and we'd be healthier if we did.
Why do you think that meat is the problem when it comes to health?
> I truly want to see a world where plant-based is cheaper and tastes even better than real meat.
I would not object to this, so long as the meat substitute is also as nutritious as real meat, or at least less nutritionally-offensive than current meat substitutes. Current generation plant-based meat are not only less nutritious than real meat but contain ingredients that people have no business consuming if they can avoid it.
I've absolutely no idea why they do their very best to pass their stuff off as meat. I've seen things in the sandwich fridge in supermarkets with massive high-contrast letters saying CHICKEN and then in a tiny, barely legible yellow on light background "plant-based" above it. This kind of nonsense doesn't help vegetarians find the non-meat options available to them, and it just annoys people who want an actual chicken sandwich and they bite into it and find something else.
Some people love the idea of plant-based food, others don't. Let them make an informed decision, don't let companies rely on trickery to sell stuff.
Of course, there's the aspect to this that it's a lot cheaper to make something out of chickpeas than meat, so they're probably relying on people buying it in error and paying what they think is a fair price for a meat sandwich rather than realising it's an over-inflated price for what the food actually is.
Plenty of vegans are vegan because of ethics but still miss the taste of meat, so substitutes make perfect sense.
It also makes sense from a recruiting standpoint. There's a cultish aspect to veganism, which is why vegans are notorious for announcing that they are vegan, and they need new members to join their religion in order to maintain their sense of superiority. Their thought is that if meat eaters can be satisfied by fake plant-based meat that they might give up eating meat and become vegan.
I agree with the actual point you're making — though I can imagine a DnD-style alignment chart with one axis for substance purity and the other for functional equivalence, such a chart has both soy milk and peanut butter in the "functional purity, ingredient rebel" corner.
https://www.tastingtable.com/893109/the-unique-history-behin...
It's a cultural difference but seems like a fine one that just emphasizes food quality. People are just upset because they think vegetarians should have some special status and don't like anything that opposes such an agenda.
We'll likely need more distinctions as we also have lab-grown as well as plant-based containing heme so is like meat in composition not source. For someone avoiding red meats for health reasons may also want to avoid these.
I'm not sure what this adds to the applicable law already. But then again, we love creating new laws.
[1] (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000045978360)
If you're going to go vegan/vegetarian, just _go_ for it. Stop pining for things you can't have. No, nothing that is not steak will taste like steak — and there's nothing wrong with that! A vegetarian diet can be delicious and good for you. Own it.
I get that it should be obvious, but I've more than once picked up a "steak" with heavy double quotes.
Democracy is not a binary thing, that’s here or not here. It’s a spectrum. Yes, last time the French people had to vote and had the choice between someone they really didn’t want and someone they didn’t really want but had no choice they voted for the later. Does that make every governement decree an expression of the French people as a whole? Of course not. Decrees like this tell you more about the political power of the meat industry than anything about the culture of the country.
> Ironically, in many contexts you are required to wear less clothes, such as at the beach or in a swimming pool.
Citation needed. There isn’t any law requiring you to wear less clothes on the beach; it would be ridicule and contrary to the Constitution.
Burkini ban: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/france-court-rules-burkin...
And in that article, on swimming pools:
> Clothing rules in public pools in France are strict, for what authorities say are reasons of hygiene: caps are required, and baggy swim trunks or other voluminous clothing is generally banned. Wetsuits are not allowed in many pools too, as are some sun-protection suits.
Officially this is a matter of public health, but it's a pseudo-scientific law that likely has more to do with French culture and national identity as a more libertine place (or else)
It’s a law from 1981 that says that for hygiene reasons bathing clothes must adhere to your body. Burkinis were invented in 2004.
Tell that to the courts.
"So far a small number of women have been fined (€38 in Cannes - £33; $43) for wearing a burkini on the beach at Cannes."
What an awful place to live. I was commenting with a friend the other day who was claiming the old "food in Europe is better for you because they have more regulations". I countered that they also have the most regulations about all the ways a website has to harass you with absolutely Zero (0) legitimate justification, so why should we expect their food regulations to be any better founded? He seemed to find that line of reasoning well founded.
For the hundredth time, the regulations do NOT tell companies to harass you. They do that to make you angry at the laws that prevent them from data harvesting you to the extent they do in the US. It's that simple. You can comply with GDPR and the cookies law 100% without ever asking the user anything.
If a website is asking you for consent for anything, they're trying to treat you as cattle they can harvest data from for sale. That's the only reason. That or utterly incompetent lawyers.
Any website who asks you about cookies or tracking thinks they are collecting more information about you than they need to do their work. Meanwhile the EU has signaled through lax enforcement that they aren't interested in going after anyone but the largest players, and seemingly more for recovering lost tax than shutting down their data collection.
There is no justification for the cookie and tracking prompts. By definition, they are direct evidence of a website trying to track you in ways they aren't allowed.
Also fun fact: just navigating to https://www.lemonde.fr/ already sets the cookies (which don't matter at all and are a 100% non-issue to everyone else in the world) without you interacting with the popup at all.
All in all a complete shit show. Kids of today will never know what it's like to go to a website and just. see. content.
Also, never underestimate the ability of lawyers to be utterly incompetent.
That was illegal and the city has been forced to reimburse the people it fined.
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/arret-anti-burkini-la-ville-d...
> And the point still stands for swimming pools, which is basically the same.
There’s no point here; for hygiene reasons you are required to wear clothes close to the body in public swimming pools. As I wrote in another comment, this is a law from 1981, while the burkini was only invented in 2004. You are free to wear religious clothing (some do), but it has to respect the basic hygiene measures.
A precinct where tradition prevails over reason would find "ah-ha!" gotchas from over 40 years ago as justification for their inherit sexism/racism and refuse to budge on them (so long as only the "inferior" race/gender/religion is affected).
Various spokepersons from the French muslim community have repeatedly said that it’s ridiculous to make a controversy out of the burkini because virtually nobody wears it. When the numbers are so anecdotical that estimates are impossible to make it’s hard to speak about "changing demographics".
Also, "the people who might disagree with me probably don't actually exist" is the lowest form of argument, combining it with an unlawful activity is rhetorically ridiculous. You are saying, quite literally: "People haven't been free do this, and they (mostly) haven't done it, therefore they (all) don't want to do it, so we shouldn't let them be free to do it".
It would be illegal for the police to do so, so no that’s not a valid argument.
> Also, "the people who might disagree with me probably don't actually exist" is the lowest form of argument, combining it with an unlawful activity is rhetorically ridiculous. You are saying, quite literally: "People haven't been free do this, and they (mostly) haven't done it, therefore they (all) don't want to do it, so we shouldn't let them be free to do it".
All I’m saying is that people who know the matter say this is an anecdotical thing.
"People who support my side say they support my side, so my side is right". K.
Also your entire argument is "the Government would never do something illegal! That'd be wrong!"
But I don't really care about France, the French, or their burkinis. Good day.
France is simply more authoritarian. It does ban burkas but it also bans hate speech. The US bans neither.
I think this particular implementation is going too far but I can definitely empathize...
I'm ashamed to admit it but I was fooled more than once into buying plant-based burgers. My grocery store puts them next to real meat, the packaging has the words "beef" and "burger" on it and they're larger font than "plant", so in a hurry I got confused.
It was just a means of avoiding each other while occupying seats. It's nonsense that people actually believe political opinions align to a single dimensional spectrum.
If that was the case, the US would be the bizarre country because it has no right wing: there are no supporters of monarchy.
There is a significant amount of people in the US who believe that their guy should've just taken power when he lost
But companies selling "vegan sausages" or "vegetable steak" aren’t trying to trick anyone, they just sell an alternative to a common meat-based product and so call it that way. It would be like forbidding e-cigarettes to be called "cigarettes" just because they’re not the same thing.
Edit: according to this comment they do try to trick consumers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392099
The only instance where manufacturers try to trick consumers are hamburgers that are part meat and part soy; and those aren't vegan or vegetarian to being with.
Not so at many stores and with many brands. Trader joes has tricked me two or three times, now I know to read all product packages carefully. [This is the point where you insult me for shopping while groggy and not paying close enough attention!]
If these food producers aren't being deceptive, then the law won't effect them or their bottom line. But of course they are, so it will.
I'm not convinced this is entirely meritless either. The packages of meat-replacements are usually right next to the ground beef in my store, and it's not trivial to pick them out from the just "Artisanal" ground beef products, unless you pick up and carefully read each and every package. Maybe they need a protected word they can use to clearly self label as a meatless product.
I'll reiterate my point since you missed it by a mile the first time: Ethical vegan internet commenters defend deceptive branding in this context but not others because they think tricking meat eaters into eating vegan food is an end that justifies the means.
If clearing up confusion around naming was really the goal they'd put forward legislation stopping people from calling a chicken sandwich a "chicken burger".
To people who think otherwise, how would you like it if I sold real sausages as "vegan sausages"? If you can call plants "bacon", you should be able to call meat "vegan", right?