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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Which is ok and entirely valid regulation. It is ok to not want the industries to rewrite meanings of words.

What is a burger? If it looks like a burger and tastes like a burger I'm fine with calling it a burger. Nobody complains about halloumi burgers. Why is "coconut milk" OK, but "soy milk" is not? Blood sausage has nothing similar with the regular sausage. Hey, there are people who put pineapple on dough and call it "pizza"[1]. I agree that industries should not be able to intentionally mislead people, but informing customers was not the primary motivation behind those laws - protecting existing monopolies was.

[1] Relax, I'm joking.

Requiring pork, beef, etc to come from the actual animal sounds completely reasonable to me, and although I do like vegetarian products that try to taste like them, they should also be easily identifiable as not being the actual meat.

But burger, sausage and nugget are just about the shape. Restricting that only to meat is silly. Veggie burgers have been around for multiple decades. There's absolutely nothing misleading about that.

Also consider the many products that are something-flavoured (often fruit, but also other things) without containing the actual thing, yet clearly marketed with the thing they don't contain. Or fake chocolate. Pizza containing mostly fake cheese. Is that not far more misleading?

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