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This used to be a witty title but some pro-censorship arse complained so here we are
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Rare French W.
If you wish buy plant based "meat" you should be free to do that, but calling "steak" what clearly isn't is just trying to fool the customer into buying something they're probably not interested in purchasing.
Have you ever been confused by coconut milk? Do you think that hamburgers come from Hamburg? Are sweetbreads made from wheat and sugar?
The worst part is that often people telling you what milk should be or not don't even know how the milk they drink is made or where it comes from. The number of non vegan people who think cows "just make milk" all the time for free and that it's carefully harvested by a dude while rubbing her back when the reality is so drastically more horrifying.
Exactly. If they want honesty in labelling then images of happy cows in fields on dairy products should be replaced by pictures of young calves being pulled from their mothers so they don't consume the milk.
Oh come on, let’s at least be honest about that (I say as someone who doesn’t drink milk anymore)
Lactating cows will continue to lactate so long as someone is taking the milk, the calves are not getting some type of despicable treatment by being weened off.
…that treatment comes after, in the slaughterhouses
...perhaps?
The earliest known burgers I have read about were made and sold as roadside snacks in the Roman empire.
Right given all the options I'm waiting more willing to pick that one than the one that involves ham being involved.
Coconout milk would be confusing if they didn't put a picture of a coconout on the label and made it evident that it what you are buying isn't actually milk. I simply believe this same reasoning also extends to meat and any other products that may have a plant based alternative.
Coconut milk also isn’t actively trying to replace milk, which isn’t true of the other products.
this is exclusively about protecting the meat & dairy industry. nothing more.
It was definitely less confusing when vegetarian products always had green packaging, and meat did not. If manufacturers aren't going to be consistent in their colour-coding, then there needs to be more clarity on the language. I'm a vegetarian, and I regularly have to double check what I'm buying because I don't want meat, and when both are packaged in orange-and-white and both called exactly the same thing, with the plant-based one only having a smaller sub-title stating it's plant-based, that doesn't make my life any easier either.
Clear packaging and labelling benefits everybody here.
They don’t do it like that because there’s a large portion of the population that wouldn’t buy an orange if it had a sticker proclaiming it was vegan, because, “did you see the sticker? Who knows what’s in that thing”
Eh I hadn't really considered the flip side but it makes sense, it's also a problem the other way around for vegetarian folks wanting to be able to spot vegetarian products at a first glance, yeah.
I live in France. I have never encountered any instance of misleading packaging. No one is being fooled. This is a bullshit excuse made up by bullshit people. The meat industry is an extremely powerful lobby here, as is industrial agriculture, and this government is bending over backwards to accommodate their every whim.
Do you buy "steak" as in a generic description for something from any animal, or do you buy bison, camel, goat or horse steak? I have only seen plant based steaks or schnitzel where it has it in the name. "Plant based product" or "product based on soy/pea"
To be fair I hardly ever buy packaged meat so I'm not sure how their labels would look. Though I would expect the plant industries would try and pass their plant based product as the real thing, to trick omnivorous people on buying it instead, so they would write "plant based" or whatever as small as possible if at all (depending on food regulations in the country they are selling it in, of course).
I guess such an assumption would base itself in vegetarian people being more careful with what they buy, compared to normal people, otherwise they'd be tricking them too.
I am in strong favor a big prominent "contains animal products" label. It would make live so much easier.
It would make life easier in the same way if the words used to describe meat weren’t then also used to describe plants pretending to be meat
…you’re essentially supporting the intent behind this legislation
No, I am against the prohibition of common terms, I advocate for a stricter declaration of ingredients. "Milk" alone could be milk from any mammal, cow, goat, human. Steak could be a cut from any animal, that is why a the animal it is from is declared. Oat milk is called milk since centuries but now the industry fears competition and is publishing propaganda and pays lobbyism for restrictive laws.
Right, but 'steak' does mean a little more than that. It also would indicate a particular kind of cut of meat, which would generally indicate minimal connective tissue, tenderness, location, etc. Now, you could say "well, all that is irrelevant to this discussion", but to an extent is really is relevant. We are talking about how word meanings are being changed and how that influences consumer choice. Imagine if we started to see companies using the word 'vegetarian ' in a way that simply meant 'containing vegetables', regardless of meat content. Already terms like 'organic' are nearly meaningless in some markets. This sort of thing happens.
Imagine a company creating a half-meat and half-plant based burger and calling the product 'Vegan Beef'. Who could be confused, some might argue here, about this product? - it has 'beef' right in the name.
Strict guidelines can also protect consumers.
To return to the original point, the term 'steak' in a food context has already become nearly meaningless (or at least has so many conflicting meanings that it has lost most of its usefulness). 'Milk' is heading that way. 'Organic' is without much meaning in the US. Would you like 'meat-free' labels allowed on foods that had absolutely no muscle-tissue content, but did contain animal organ, bone, and fat content?
So as long as it has "steak" written on it you just care that is any animal with those properties?
I want a strong indicator that a product contains any animal products. There are already many labels for plant based products but none are required by any law.
They're not even on the same shelves, there was never any confusion possible, just like people don't think "fruits de mer" are fruits or "lait de corp" is milk. This is just a completely meaningless power move from the lobbies but to be clear it is not in response to people overwhelmingly being tricked into gasp eating healthy products. Now it's the other way around and it's confusing for vegetarian/vegan people because stuff like soy milk is now labeled "soy drink" and is shelved next to the ACTUAL soy drinks with sugar and stuff in it, and so on.
Just because it's plant-based doesn't mean it's healthy. You can load up a veggie burger with all sorts of stuff that might have other benefits, but it's not health food. But otherwise, yes, this has lobbies written all over it.