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.
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
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?
Because if something is meant to imitate something else, consumers looking for such a substitute product should have an easy means of finding it. The target demographic of these products is people looking to avoid meat, so manufacturers already have an incentive to label them as being meat-free. Making them use meaningless words will inevitably confuse consumers more than a prefix such as ‘plant-based’ would, in turn discouraging adoption of such products by curious consumers, exactly the intended effect of the meat lobby that pushed for inclusion of the provision in the first place.
Sounds like standard cheapo nuggets to me
Fuck the meat lobby. Plant meat is the real deal!
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.
And a pizza is simply flat bread with sauce and toppings. Come at me, Italians.
Most “tradicional food” as we know it is less than a century old and made of pure marketing.
I will call it “animal-cruelty free meat” then.
It’s meat because it looks and tastes like meat. Simple as.
It’s not meat, it’s a meat substitute.
You can say it is a replacement for the thing, you can’t say it is the thing. Simples.
Yeah, and you’re fed farmer propaganda. Cya. :)
Yay, glad to see you understand reasoning and don’t just close off into your biased little echo chamber.
tastes like meat
The closest one to taste like meat that I’ve tried is beyond burger, which in all fairness tasted like a terrible beef burger, while costing like a premium one and being uber processed.
Each one can do what they want, but I’ll take a bean burger that doesn’t pretend otherwise before any fake meat.
Well you’re not allowed to call it a “bean burger” anymore cause that would be coNfUSInG according to the animal mass murder lobby.
I’m not mass producing, selling or advertising them, so this ruling doesn’t apply to me.
I guess it’s a good thing then that no one will be allowed to buy the bean burger you just praised from anyone in Europe?
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 the animal mass murder industry to slow down the transition to a slightly less cruel food production system and these politicians are earning some blood money?
Ok OK you win. It’s a bean patty.
I’ll go to eat some rare steaks now. Real beef, of course.
Well you’re not allowed to call it a “bean burger” anymore cause that would be coNfUSInG according to the animal mass murder lobby.
Can you find a primary source for this? Because all I see is articles that may well be clickbait. I want to see what they actually voted on.
I think certain terms are definitively meat, eg steak, but saying a burger is exclusively meat is like saying a pizza must have plain tomato sauce.
In any case, this hasn’t been finalised yet as the European Commission - the actual competent lawyers rather than populist representatives (who might not actually represent their voters) - have yet to have their say. I’d hope that common sense would withdraw “burger” from any law that comes out of this.
Edit: With (far too much) digging I managed to find what they voted on, and it does indeed include burger: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-0214_EN.html Ammendment 113, if you just search the page for “burger” you’ll find the list of terms.
These names include, for example:
— Steak — Escalope — Sausage — Burger — Hamburger — Egg yolk — Egg white.
You need a dash to be Free-Meat.
Don’t feed it to a GNU/Linux nerd though. They might misunderstand their own epiphany.
Well that’s a dumb fucking take.
Facts don’t care though, because it’s what it is: it’s meat, just without animal suffering.
sam o nella has got some research on it
and iirc he loves meat so yeah. basically animals are put into concentration camp-like conditions, except they overfeed them, and then kill them in cruel ways and with horrifying efficiency.
I don’t give a fuck about the animal cruelty part… it’s different food, just call it something different. What’s so difficult to understand?
Aight, if animal cruelty is no problem, fair. That’s valid. We’re all humans, after all.
So, I take it you then don’t object to being stuffed with pesticides, herded with thousands of people in a crammed space, and transported off with a truck to slaughter, where you get stunned, electrically tortured, chopped and cut into bits, with your skin being used for leather?
Just want to let you know that the meat industry is doing exactly what people did to the Jews many years ago.
I followed your instructions and called it something different; animal-cruelty free meat. Why do you feel attacked for something that does not affect you in the slightest?
You make a valid point off subject. Have you seen the Epstein files yet?
Again with the animal cruelty. This isn’t about animal cruelty. I welcome lab grown meat, which is actually meat. I just don’t understand why there is a need to imitate the meat industry. They can create new things, better things, and it doesn’t have to be related to the meat industry at all. Now it’s something similar tasting but not quite the same food. If it’s labeled as something completely different maybe it would get more popular.
Plant meat
There is no such thing.
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.
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.
early 14c., “meat from the back and sides of a hog” (originally either fresh or cured, but especially cured), from Old French bacon, from Proto-Germanic *bakkon “back meat” (source also of Old High German bahho, Old Dutch baken “bacon”), from the source of back (n.).
Nah, bacon is bacon
Good. Fuck turkey bacon. It should still exist as a substitute, for my Muslim friends and whoever else, but they should call it something else.
Based (dis)agreement
Just like how the rules forbidding plant milk to be called milk make no sense. Plant milk has existed for many centuries.
“Plant milk” could be a bit like “berry” though, in that as we have consolidated and rationalised our definitions it falls out of it. When we tried to come up with a clear idea of what a “berry” is we ended up excluding almost everything that has “berry” in the name. Like how tomatoes are fruits by the technical definition of a fruit.
Except for the fact that the reason plant milk is being excluded is entirely commercial lobbying, rather than a scientific or rational definition.
Is this like algebra where the order of operations matters?
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
I forgot it was commemorative, let’s ban coronation chickpea and coronation chicken.
Coronation Chicken is fine as it’s royally sanctioned
Coronation chickpea is fine as it’s royally forbidden.
Off with your head!!!
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’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
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.
“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?
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.
Idk, ive never seen plant based food that’s ambigious over whether or not it contains meat. Thats kind of the selling point of the product after all.
It feels like this law is just to undermine the competition.
I’m sorry, maybe your area is different and the packaging doesn’t show “plant based”, “soy”, “oat milk” etc prominently. But that’s just so far outside my experience I can’t imagine it.
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.)
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.
Accidentally eating a vegetable, you poor thing!
It’s not about accidentally eating vegetables, it’s about products being marketed in a misleading way. If I order a pizza with bacon on it, I don’t want turkey, let alone a vegetable substitute.
However many terms are already agnostic, eg pattie, burger; these kind of things should be allowed. Also, “cooks like ground beef” isn’t a problem, however maybe the way the words highlight “ground beef” might be. Like, the “cooks from” and “made from plants” are white text on a light coloured background, as if to try and make it easier to miss.
There are already laws against intentionally misleading people with advertising. Done properly, this is just an extension of that, to counter businesses trying to get around the current law.
This be the type of person to drink Scheuermilch and sue Kinder Schokolade for child cruelty.
Clearly they sipped a bit too much Scheuermilch as a kid
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.
It is. It would even be better if all the public lying was banned, not just this one.
Most people in the comments are overreacting. Nothing is banned, just the right to name your product meat if it’s not.
Beefsteak tomatoes would like a word.
Italian: cuore di bue French: cœur de bœuf
