We've used "meat" to describe lots of things that we eat for a very long time. This is purely bending the knee to a lobby and hyper regulation of enterprise. It makes sense since that's a core value of republican... wait a second! What's happening? What about free enterprise and not having to do things that go against your personal values in business, like serving The Gays or paying for birth control????
Nobody is fooled. It's called "Beyond Beef," not "Beef." This regulation would make it illegal to label something as "Not Chicken" because lobbyist convinced the state that Texans are too stupid and illiterate to recognize anything but the word "Chicken." Frankly, this law is f'ing insulting. I live in Texas and I know how to read.
Full disclosure: I'm not vegan or even vegetarian.
The biggest advertising lie from all these companies was "it's so good that you can't tell it apart, vegetarians even sick from it". If you ever tried it, it's not Beyond Beef, it's more of Near Rubbish.
Can you recognize that some people hold different opinions from you? You feel that way - great. But clearly not everyone does, and labelling the product as what it’s historical analogue is allows people to have a sense of what they are getting. Did the designer try to mimic beef, or chicken, or pork, or what? It’s handy for the newly curious.
Unsure what's the personal attack for, but to answer the second part of your comment - should we also allow labelling quinoa as pork imitation? I mean it has the protein...
It's handy to know when you are in substitutes section and seeing what is what. Hijacking SKU is fraud.
> We've used "meat" to describe lots of things that we eat for a very long time.
That's not a very good argument. Those other uses are only valid in very specific contexts. If someone ordered "extra meat" for their sandwich, and the restaurant threw in some apple slices (as in meat = "the edible part of anything, as a fruit or nut"), pretty much everyone would find that to be scammy.
> Nobody is fooled. It's called "Beyond Beef," not "Beef."
Yet. This fake "beef" is currently a trendy novelty product. If/when it becomes cheaper than real beef, I guarantee you that there will be concerted attempts to trick people into buying it.
These kinds of naming standards are necessary. For instance the difference between "frozen dairy dessert" and "ice cream" (which as a specific government enforced definition). They're both marketed like ice cream, but if I see the former label, I know not to buy it because it's cost-reduced crap (e.g. they whipped so much air into it it can't be called ice cream anymore).
> If someone ordered "extra meat" for their sandwich, and the restaurant threw in some apple slices
I guess that depends, is it an apple sandwich or a chicken sandwich? Context clues come into play. If I ordered a Beyond Beef sandwich and asked for extra meat, do you think I'd be asking for pork?
> is currently a trendy novelty product.
Your bias is showing. Nobody looking at the actual market would agree. Major players in factory farming are getting into the act. They not only don't see it as a novelty but also they see how good the margins are.
> when it becomes cheaper than real beef, I guarantee you that there will be concerted attempts to trick people into buying it.
Why would there need to be an effort to trick people and why would it be the non animal products doing the tricking? When it becomes cheaper then animal based meats, wouldn't it be the ranching industry that would benefit from market manipulation?
> I know not to buy it because it's cost-reduced crap
Cool. Biased and loudly subjective. Double points.
I get it. You've put some part of your personal identity politics on making sure people know what you eat. Your arguments are broken though. This is the type of rhetoric that stems from a fragile ego. I'm not saying your ego is fragile but it's whipped so full of air that it can't be called confident any more. (See what I did there?)
> The bill will also keep companies that produce food from...cell cultures, not slaughtered animals, from using the label “meat,”
Do we need to make up a new word for “chunks of bovine muscle tissue” if it wasn’t cut out of a whole-ish cow?
Sounds to me like it’s about entrenched farming interests throwing red tape at a perceived threat, not “truth in advertising”. No plant burger or vegan cheeze on the market is nefariously hiding their true identity. They actively market their non-meat-ness, to appeal to their main demographic of meat-avoiders, in big green letters on their packaging. There’s no confusion between their earthy/futurey brand names, versus the old-fashioned-farmer style branding of their slaughtered-animal (their words!) counterparts.
I think it makes sense to standardize some word for the difference, especially since you’re talking about a commodity.
I imagine cheap meat is going to be qualitatively different than cheap Meetabix or whatever they will call it for some years. “It came from a cow” will impose some kind of minimum quality standard — and it’s not clear that standard will always be met in a non standardized market of bovine cell growers.
And the inputs are different. Should an increase in cow meat futures drive up grain prices or plastic clamshell prices?
I agree with you on the muscle tissue grown in a lab, if it's more or less the same as bovine tissue from an ex-animal, I think it's fair to call it beef.
New synthetic materials though should find their own nouns to use and not coöpt terms with longstanding meanings.
Right… the primary motivation of Texas lawmakers is that they are concerned about people being fooled…
I want to be able to buy non-dairy yogurt and non-dairy mayo. Not “yellow paste” or “white soft creamy desert”. There is nothing wrong with products adapting to new realities and offering alternatives under the same general name. These products are clearly labeled already. The only reason to introduce this legislation is to protect powerful animal product lobbies.
I find this discussion fascinating. We are both consumers discussing consumer rights. I - a consumer - want to be able to buy a product I recognize by name, that is also made from specific ingredients that I choose, e.g. almond milk. I don’t need your protection from being “fooled”. You - a consumer - don’t own the ingredients that must be contained in a specific product.
Velveeta can't even be called “cheese spread” despite having more similarity to any reasonable definition of that term than any non-dairy simulant has to yogurt. If people want to sell and buy plant-based yogurt-style products, that’s fine, but sellers of sich goods shouldn’t expect to be allowed to call them “yogurt”.
I am holding in my hands right now a container that is labeled Cashewmilk Yogurt (produced by Forager). It’s a great tasting non dairy yogurt. Highly recommend!
Are "soy milk" and "almond milk" and "oat milk" off-limits, too? Since none of them are actually female mammal secretions, what should we call them instead ?
But that's not what the English ear hears... and on the other hand, in Chinese Tofu is the reference whereas in English Cheese is the reference object.
Moreover, Chinese word creation clobs disconnected words together to make new words. Fire + chicken = Turkey, Fire + Car = Locomotive/Train, Fly + Machine = Aircraft, etc. So this is not out of the ordinary for Chinese word creation.
Curd doesn't traditionally exist in (Han) China, as with most other dairy. There's a word for it now (凝乳) but it's not in any relation to tofu.
The "fu" in doufu taken by itself does indeed mean rotten. But characters on their own can have very different meanings compared to when used in combination in words. There isn't necessarily a connection, just like in English the word "rotten" doesn't have anything to do with the number 10 that's contained in it.
Tofu isn't fermented but made by boiling soy milk and adding a coagulating agent. I was curious and looked it up and that process was described the same way already in Ming Dynasty, so the "rotten" character might just be random and not have any such meaning. It's very common in Chinese that new concepts are expressed with existing characters, because you can't go around making up a new character for everything, no one could ever remember that many characters (bad enough as it is). Often it's just about the sound. For example the characters in the word for cheese (起司) mean "rise" and "manage" when taken on their own. It would be gibberish to read it that way, but every Chinese person knows combined they mean cheese.
Cheese is being referenced because it's a natural extension of "You can't call it X if it's not the way we used to do X". If Texas wants to limit the definition of meat, then logically they should be limiting the definition of cheese, milk, and even salt, for that matter.
Without that, it looks less like a matter of evenhanded regulatory enforcement or consumer protection, and more like a legislature beholden to a corporation.
Indeed. I like my peanut paste and frankfurters myself. Beer, on the other hand, I can understand that. It makes sense to me. On the other hand, we don't eat "chien" in Western culture, but in dire circumstances, so there is low probability of confusion with a hot-dog.
Is the premise here that beyond beef et al. are trying to trick customers into thinking they are buying regular beef? A moment's thought reveals that to be utterly absurd. Their business model is entirely dependent on people buying their product specifically because it is plant-based. Seems like old-fashioned protection of a favored industry.
I let google autocomplete "Beyond" and found "Beyond Bread." Without looking, and without previous brand recognition, tell me what "beyond" bread means.
If you look at an actual beyond beef package, you'll see that they say "plant-based" in huge letters on the front. Again, it's integral to their product's market niche that it (a) can be substituted for beef and (b) is not made from animal products. The idea that they're trying to trick anyone here is absurd. If customers believed beyond was actually beef, they would go out of business within a year.
They have a point. Almond milk is not milk, that is a fact, but by including the term “milk” it allows then to get into the dairy section of grocery stores, and piggyback on milk as a product. Same here with plant based food.
What a terrible loss for me as a person to be able to go to the store and buy a "milk" that doesn't come from a cow but that I can put on breakfast cereal and drink with my coffee.
Meanwhile I don't see Texas aggressively defending the truth that a tomato is really a fruit and shouldn't be placed with other vegetables in the store.
Eggs are not milk either, that is a fact, yet they are also found in the dairy section of grocery stores. Our government should put a stop to this un-American behavior.
This is good legislation getting ahead of the inevitable problems when actually good tasting textured vegetable proteins become cheaper than meat. Once it's cheaper than meat it will be used to replace meat to cut costs in anything at all packaged or processed. The labeling requirements will be needed for consumer protection.
It seems like it's a broken legislature being right twice a day kind of thing. They're proposing it for reactionary reasons but it will address a real consumer rights issue in the future.
I have wondered about this. If there is "beyond meat" could there also be "beyond vegan" which is vegan produced enhanced and made better with meat products. Other lines also work, "improved vegan", "vegan like".
Kissing up to the cattle industry. Only an true idiot would think plant based is the same as beef or meat. This is strictly cozying up to beef industry and their lobbyists. This type of thing is an everyday occurrence in Texas.
It's going to be a fun game of whackamole as Beyond Meat starts producing "steak", "fillets", "bacon", etc and other things not explicitly listed in that bill.
I'm hoping they also throw in lobbying for the other thing Texans blindly care about: oil.
OLIVE OIL??? VEGETABLE OIL?? HOW THE HELL CAN THEY CALL IT OIL WHEN IT'S NOT FROM THE FAKE DINO BONUS JESUS PLANTED IN THE DIRT THAT WE USE TO MAKE THE CARS GO?!?!?!
I think politicians are generally expecting the industry to come up with a different name. For all the people talking about being "insulted" by these protections, then maybe you'd be insulted by the fact that orange juice, pasteurized milk, ice cream, and yogurt are all things that have general definitions what constitutes them because businesses have deliberately tried to fool the public. It's why you can't just throw 1% orange juice with sugar water and call it orange juice because you threw some pulp in there. Sometimes this is the FDA and sometimes it's a state, as is the case with frozen yogurt and the state of California. [0]
Companies like Beyond Meat are producing products that the aspire to taste just like beef. This is one of the first laws I expected to see, because it's standard practice based on precedent.
I don't think this is a big problem. A beyond meat burger could be marketed as a 'beyond burger'. I don't think people are that silly that they need 'meat' in the name to know it's a meat substitute.
But there are companies that have already built up brand recognition using these names. This regulation places an unfair burden on them.
In any case, if your premise that people are not silly is correct, surely they don't need to be protected from confusing animal meat with meat substitutes.
True, but if the companies already have good brand recognition, then a label change shouldn't affect their current sales. I'm sure the marketing teams will come up with something to assist with new customers.
Society as a whole seems to be progressing towards a lower meat intake diet, so I would think it's likely that new and existing brands of meat alternatives will continue to do well.
I am enjoying the opportunity to separate the libertarians from the corporatists. "Small government! No regulations! Except for the ones that profit me!"
Ah, of course, Texas is starting the war on cultured meat. The next decade is going to be fascinating: endless legal blocks attempting to slow down the animal product revolution.
Seems more of a truth in labeling measure. A product won’t be allowed to say it contains the meat if it doesn’t. Also says that it cannot claim to imitate the meat if it doesn’t. But the bar for “sufficiently imitates to be allowed to say it imitates” is unclear. Any poor imitation of a Picasso is still an imitation.
Talking about “hamburger” is laughable, as ground-up people from Hamburg is forbidden by most culinary guidelines. Waiting for the hammer to fall on hot dog labelling.
Make up your own new word for the new product. Tufu isn't "bean cheese".
People don't need "to be fooled" in order to get them to try highly processed plant products. Truth in advertising and all that.
If you're selling processed plants or insects, great, market it and label it as such. If it's yummy, people will lap it up.