No more cordon blur: France prepares to ban vegetarian products from using meaty language
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The point is the meat industry is afraid of competition.
One of the biggest German meat production companies started introducing vegetarian and vegan products 10 years ago - last year they made more profit from then than from their meat branch and are remodelling meat-processing factories for replacements - it’s just like everywhere - if you don’t lead or follow the change you’ll have to try to stop change itself
The shitty thing is that this culture war against replacements is also majorly fucking up our chances to combat climate change as a change away from the meat-heavy diet most people have on a population level would be one of the most effective changes we could make as a society to give us a better chance…
But saving the planet might slightly cut the rate of increase in profit for these companies.
Trading a 78% increase for 76%, but also the planet gets to live, simply isn’t worth it to them.
I really don’t see the problem with honesty in product marketing, aside from the fact that it should be 100% and not limited to artificial meat products. That said, a ban doesn’t seem like the best idea, because it limits your ability to describe the product. How do you describe artificial spare ribs concisely, without being able to say the words “spare” and “ribs” together?
And just because artificial meat isn’t indistinguishable from the real thing at the moment doesn’t mean:
- Manufacturers aren’t dressing up the packaging in a way that makes it difficult to tell the difference. And not even necessarily in order to be deceitful, but rather to make it look appealing, and get more people to try it.
- When you’re tired, and hungry, and just want to get back home from a shopping trip, you accidentally choose the wrong package because the identifiers don’t stand out sufficiently. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally bought something with artificial sweetener, after staring right at the two options, and registering that I don’t want the one.
I wish we could just get past the loud, over the top design language of literally everything. Every time I leave the house, it’s an assault on my senses, everywhere I turn.
That’s a bit rich coming from the people who call a potato a ground apple.
In the future, please do not editorialize titles unless the title is clickbait and you’re providing a title which isn’t.
I looked through the Giant Instruction Manual of Lemmy for this and I couldn’t see any recommendations about titles but I’ll change it for you if I can.
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?
- No
- Yes
- I would have guessed that, yes. I guess I just learnt a new word lol
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.
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.
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”
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Is anybody out there buying vegan stuff thinking it’s meat? Read the label. You should be doing that anyway.
honestly if people don’t notice it’s vegan that company fully deserves to call it meat, more power to them.
As soon as we conceded “milk” for plant milks we were setting off on a long path of bullshit. If something is designed as an alternative to something it should be able to explain it’s designed purpose.
Wasn’t there an EU court case a couple of years ago that determined that supplements are allowed use meaty language?
