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Comment by NickM | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a vegetarian but I like to eat fake meat burgers and stuff like that, and it's really weird to me how sensitive some people get about this. I have friends who get genuinely mad that they call fake meat products "meat" because "it's not meat and they should call it something else".

Nobody seems to actually be confused into thinking these products came from an animal, though, and the labeling does not seem to be designed to fool anyone. If the taste is designed to mimic a cow burger, then calling it a burger is genuinely descriptive.

When I point this out though, people just switch gears and start making up other arguments instead. The emotional response seems to be coming from somewhere else, but I haven't figured out where.

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My family has even introduced new words for some of these meatless products such as facon for the plant-based bacon, soysage for the plant-based sausage, and not dogs for the plant-based hot dogs. We've been eating these products for decades, along with the "traditional" vegetarian proteins.

Meanwhile, hamburgers aren't burgers made from ham, and milk is a word used to describe a liquid available from several animal and plant sources.

People are losing their minds over trivial nonsense. It's the phenomenon of our time.

Many people don't question why we have words for things, and speak as if there's some word-particle or word-god that determined what all words mean, as opposed to words having uses that grow and evolve as humans grow and evolve. There will always be that form of concrete thinking, but I think the sort of rote-style learning in American schools is in part responsible for otherwise intelligent individuals believing that American cheese is a lie because "it's not cultured therefor it's not cheese!"

Perhaps I don't care enough either way. Even if the metaphysics of language different such that words could only ever have one very specific immutable meaning, I can't imaging caring enough that I would object to something being referred to as "oat milk."

To be fair, American "cheese" isn't legally able to sold as "cheese" in America. That's a fun enough piece of trivia that it gets shared a lot.

There is something to be said for basic truth in advertising law, though. There is a fundamental difference in quality between what meets the requirements for "ice cream", "frozen dairy dessert", and "frozen dessert".

> Meanwhile, hamburgers aren't burgers made from ham

Right? Who wouldn't go for some city-raised[1] pork?

(A clarification, to reduce confusion for readers not well-acquainted with Western meat dishes: Hamburgers are named after the city of Hamburg, and are always made from beef.)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgher_(social_class)

Often the root cause ia cognitive dissonance. A large portion of the populace doesn't want to be reminded where their meat actually comes from, and prefers to not think about it. Confronting them with the notion of non-animal "meat" forces them to face that dissonance.

> Nobody seems to actually be confused into thinking these products came from an animal, though, and the labeling does not seem to be designed to fool anyone.

Multiple people here have, presumably because it is

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