EU parliament votes to ban meat names for plant-based foods

Beefsteak tomatoes would like a word.

Italian: cuore di bue French: cœur de bœuf

It seems the meat lobby is way too strong. 🙄

They’ve been beefing it up for a while now.
- They don't mince their words!

What a wasteful non issue. Then again, wastefulness suits the meat industry and it's lobby very well

Imagine people ordering a "lentil burger", "soy burger", "plant burger", "bean burger", or "chickpea burger", and receiving a vegan meal.

Can you imagine how shocked and deceived, perhaps even violated they may feel? The horror!

Luckily the European Christian Democrats protected European citizens from this huge and common problem instead of, oh I dunno, helping European industry with the energy transition or end a genocide. They have their priorities straight here.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is another attempt by a panicked industry to slow down the transition to a slightly less cruel food production system and these politicians are earning some side money?

EDITED for tastefulness of words. The only words I changed are the only ones that OP quoted and responded to below. The rest of the message was ignored. I actually learned a valuable lesson today, thanks Felix!

"slightly less cruel" that is a gross understatement. The comparison is night and day.
animal mass murder industry
You vegans are so funny 🤣🤣🤣
- Should I call it ecocide industry then?
  Lung disease spreaders industry?
  Epidemic production industry?
  You don't have to care about animals at all to see the benefits of reducing meat production.

now i can't get dino nuggies cause there's no dinosaurs in them :(

If they're made from chicken, which like all birds are literally extant dinosaurs, then yes there are!
This an ancient artifact of thought preservation, to be real.
Mostly because they'll start using AI clones of bones.

Fuck the meat lobby. Plant meat is the real deal!

I was going to disagree with you based on etymological pedantry, but it turns out the Old English "mete" just means "food" so now I have to agree with you based on etymological pedantry.
- Just like how the rules forbidding plant milk to be called milk make no sense. Plant milk has existed for many centuries.
- Based (dis)agreement
- Fuck's sake, 2nd time that's happened to me in this thread. I thought steak should just be beef, but it turns out:
  The word steak was written steke in Middle English, and comes from the mid-15th century Scandinavian word steik, related to the Old Norse steikja 'to roast on a stake', and so is related to the word stick or stake.
  I don't even want to look up bacon now, I need to believe that it should just be pig.
- Is this like algebra where the order of operations matters?
If plant "meat" is real, it would be part of the same lobby. It's not meat. Just call it something else.
- The terms burger and steak don't describe the contents of the food but the shape. And the word meat, in English, doesn't exclusively meant the flesh of an animal. So calling something vegan meat, or soy burger, is exactly the description a costumer would need. Anything else would be either a convoluted name or less descriptive.
- I will call it "animal-cruelty free meat" then.
  It's meat because it looks and tastes like meat. Simple as.
Plant meat
There is no such thing.

Meat lobbyists forcing regulations on products that threaten the meat industry.

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

Nothing will meaningfully improve
It just did. European Parliament voted for regulations protecting consumers from deception used by the plant pulp industry.
- Yay global warming solved! XD
  /s
  It's insane seeing adults make these crying baby comments about not eating as much meat so we all don't boil alive.
  Throw out that pathetic ego, it isn't doing you any favors.
- Accidentally eating a vegetable, you poor thing!
- This be the type of person to drink Scheuermilch and sue Kinder Schokolade for child cruelty.

When has “burger” or “steak” ever exclusively meant meat from an animal? This sounds like political corruption to me. Somebody is getting paid for turning this linguistic gaslighting into law.

A “burger” has always been a mince patty of any kind and a “steak” is a thick slab of something. The default assumption may be meat, but it has never been exclusive.

Edit
OP appears to have a serious problem accepting facts. It’s disappointing given the number of upvotes Voyager shows for them. I suppose nobody is perfect.

I agree that burger has always been agnostic, but steak should really just be meat. Etymologically, it was always meat roasted on a stake. Similarly, bacon should just be a specific cut of pig meat, not turkey. Both of these are intentionally misleading marketing - with bacon it's even so when they're using different meats, let alone vegetables.
Intentionally misleading people through advertising, in order to get more sales, is wrong.
And don't get me started on American "biscuits" that are not cooked twice. They're savoury scones.
- I mean... I kind of agree with you, but at the same time... Come on, the things have green packaging and "vegan" or "vegetarian" plastered all over the print. Not to mention they're being sold in separate sections in stores, not where the meat is.
  You need to really not be paying attention to get "tricked" by this.
- What about steak mushrooms literally their name, cauliflower steak, or something with a wooden steak in it?

I'm throwing out the terms BURGR, SAUSGE, STEK as prior art so nobody can trademark them and everybody that produces vegetarian or vegan food can use them free of charge.

Some brands are already doing stuff like this. Here in Sweden we have "Ch*cken style", "Chick-un" etc. And some are pretty funny but does break these new shitty rules like "meat-free meatballs".
I don't think thats how trademark law works, but I appreciate the energy

You expect this from Texas but are shocked and disappointed when it's the EU.

Honestly I think that this might be a good thing for veggie prosucts

Some vegetable products make for pretty bad versions of their meat based counterpart but would be great products on their own accor

I've seen "plant based chicken nuggets", (0% chicken) which doesnt make sense

Good rule, food market stays the same, but these should be called "veggie nuggets" or whatever

I've seen "chicken-free nuggets", which makes more sense IMO.
- But why not include every other thing it doesn't have in it?
- Sounds like standard cheapo nuggets to me

I'm guessing they're trying to distract people from the fact that they're cutting back sustainability laws even further.

Nah it was just a day for farmers to bitch and moan and get their way a bit with the European Parliament. Literally, almost everything they were voting on was farming related.

Damn I better go stockpile pea-based mince(d meat).

(If you haven't tried it before, seriously, do. There's so many (traditional) recipes with minced meat for which this is a 1:1 replacement, it opens up an entire new world of cooking for vegetarian/vegan kitchens.)

Well I think this law could be fine, depending on how far exactly it goes. I don't really think it's appropriate to call vegetarian products "bacon" or "steak", however "burger" is already generic enough (you can have a beef burger, chicken burger, or veggie burger). In the article image, it says "cooks like ground beef" which should also be ok. A "pattie" is also not necessarily a specific type of meat. Hell, I even take offense at "turkey bacon" - the point is that it is intentionally misleading.

Aldi here are selling plant based products like "no chicken burger". It's literally saying there's no chicken. I wonder if that will get banned.
- Depends on how exactly it's presented. There's a fine line between saying the product is a substitute for something, and misleading people into thinking it is the thing. Like the OP picture, it says "cooks like ground beef", which is okay in text, but on the box "cooks like" is white text on a light colour background, as if to create the possibility of you glancing at the packaging and only seeing "ground beef".
  If it's just "No Chicken", that's fine, but if it's like ^no CHICKEN then maybe not.

I wish they'd ban the name "coronation chickpea" here.

I've been caught out by that. Very disappointing sandwich
- I don't even know if it is legal. Coronation Chicken got the title as it was a recipe chosen by (or on behalf of) Queen Elizabeth II on her coronation. King Charles III's Coronation had Coronation Quiche. I don't think any old bloke can use the term "Coronation", I think it's protected like how you cannot call your shop "The Royal Café" or use the Tudor Crown on non-commemorative merchandise

"Celine Imart, the French member of the parliament who led the initiative..."

Of course it was French-led!

Wonder what the rules for lab grown muscle will be? Is it the suffering that defines the word?

Most people in the comments are overreacting. Nothing is banned, just the right to name your product meat if it's not.

Felt the need to say this:

Downvotes are supposed to mean "does not contribute to the discussion", not "I don't agree with this".

Do you think downvoting people to oblivion helps the cause?

Does not contribute to the discussion

Great news! Hopefully the US follows suit, and does the same for milk and cheese!

Why...
- So that I don't have to keep spending ten minutes triple-checking packages of food every time I go shopping, ever since the time I double-checked that I was buying actual mozzarella, only to find that my cheesy bread tasted like plastic that evening due to misleading packaging and small print.
  I want to be able to walk into the store, blindly grab packages that say "burgers" and "cheese" without having to take ten minutes to scour them, and not be blindsided when I get home by what I believe amounts to false advertising. Not to mention this will make it less likely that people morally or ethically opposed to meat and dairy products accidentally purchase those products.
  Maybe I'm missing something, but it honestly seems like a purely positive change with no downsides whatsoever, other than to vegans mad that meat and dairy exist at all. The products will all still be available to buy, but will now be less likely to confuse consumers.
  Edit: [Here's] a great example from lower in the thread. You either have to have specific cultural knowledge that "Beyond" means "no meat", or you have to check the actual ingredients.
  Instead of this intentionally misleading garbage, you could have the large print actually say something like "PLANT PATTY", and then the small print say "Compare to a chicken burger patty!" or something like that.

I sat down in a high volume bakery in a German pedestrian zone recently only to find that the chicken sandwich I had picked out was really some kind of fake cardboard plant meat. I have nothing against that sort of thing and I'm open to trying new things, but they used some misleading terminology to make it sound like meat. I remember being irritated at the time and I'm glad the politicians have this issue in their sights. Having said that, I'm baffled this is important enough in contrast to the rest of world events to actually warrant attention and action.

Things that never happened, part 473.
- Fr. Is this AI slop?
- Pretty sure it was "Backwerk". I would also be surprised if it wasn't in the small print on the sign or something. The point for me was that I should have made that choice consciously, but due to the "meaty" language and my hurried state, I was misled into thinking it was meat. Consumers should know what they are getting based on how it is described and I found the description lacking in specificity. Apparently this is not enough for me to complain until I saw an article on Lemmy about the EU addressing it. :-)

I'm really enjoying all the angst this one is stirring up. I got plenty of things to care about but this one isn't one of them.

Edit: The butthurt is real and strong.

You cared enough to comment.
- I commented how much fun I'm having watching all the whining. I don't care so I love watching it. You care too much.
  Edit: ;P Edit2: lol

Good, product names should not be misleading.

Edit: I wonder what idiots think product names SHOULD be misleading.

I agree. Burgers should be called tortured ground-up cows.
- Who is torturing you?
So how should a veggie burger be called?
- Vegetable patty
- "Disk of disappointment"?
- "heavily processed plant pulp" will do.
Coconut milk has been called milk since forever and nobody's surprised a cow wasn't involved.
This only became an issue when alternatives to meat and dairy got popular because these restrictions on naming has nothing to do with clarity and everything to do with mega farm owners wanting to crush the opposition to their racket. They don't want to replace "oat milk" with "oat enhanced water" because they care about you, they do it because they hate competition.
- That's exactly the ridiculous premise of this discussion, and I'm tired of everyone pretending it isn't. Everyone knows what oat milk is and what it isn't, no-one's getting confused. In most supermarkets, the plant-based stuff is on a separate shelf for clarity (I assume).
  Someone else said it on here, but if you're confusing plant-based stuff for meat-based stuff, you got bigger problems to worry about.
if you are "mislead" by a veggie burger being called a veggie burger then you have bigger problems
agreed - if this does pass I can't wait to stop seeing "burger" as a term used to mean anything but the minced flesh patty and all uses of "burger" for the whole sandwich to be made illegal as bread, lettuce, tomato, etc obv aren't made of animals
also I hope somebody finally starts enforcing this so we stop getting confusing product names like "peanut butter" - you're telling me a peanut was milked and then churned? mm I don't think so..
- I assume you're being sarcastic, but when I was growing up in Australia we didn't call it peanut butter, it was peanut paste. Because the dairy lobby didn't want the confusion.
Consumers readily know what a 'burger' is, and will readily understand that it is meat-free if 'plant-based' is used as a prefix to it. Plant-based burgers are intended to be substitute products for meat-based burgers, so disallowing the use of the word 'burger' will inevitably confuse consumers as to the nature of such products. Clear distinction is possible without directly favoring the meat lobby.
- 'plant-based butter'.
- Plant-based burgers
  *heavily processed plant pulp
According to some definitions fish is not meat. What should a fish burger be called then?
- Living animals are made of meat.
  Edit: I got downvoted, but I have filleted a fish before, they are full of organs and blood. Your wacky religions can call it what you want I guess?
- According to what definitions?
100%. Misleading marketing is not the right way to encourage people to change their habits. It should not be.
- Do hotdogs and fish fingers confuse you, or are you perfectly capable of understanding hotdogs aren't made of dog and fish don't have fingers?
- To anyone dowvoting my remark, you're more than welcome to tell me why/what you're downvoting. At least, if by downvoting you wanted help me understand why there may be an issue with my comment. If not, don't change a thing ;)