Comment by Aromasin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aromasin | Hacker News Reader

This quote puts it quite succinctly: “Do people confuse motor oil, olive oil and jojoba oil? I think not. No more than they confuse vegan steak from beef steak.”

The same thing as in France has happened in the UK. Social media was inundated with tweed-wearing, flat-cap touting, Jeremy Clarkson idolizers who seemed utterly outraged at the idea of someone using "sausage" to describe something shaped and tasting like a sausage. Some so frothing berserk over the idea, that you'd think that plant-based food producers were planning to take these people's children in the night and make sausages out of them. Utterly unhinged.

It's Orwellian newspeak in a new form; just driven by lobbyists and think-tanks from the animal agriculture industry, rather than the Party. The language came organically and is being clamped down artificially. It's pathetic, and I despise the fact our supposedly "liberal" governments are backing into this pressure. People should be able to call their food whatever they want provided the ingredients are included on the package. No one needs "protecting" from this, and the value-add to society is less than the cost of ink that went into signing the policy; probably less that the computing power required to type this comment.

There's already legislation that says e.g. if you advertise "strawberry yogurt" you must include actual strawberry, otherwise it has to be "strawberry flavor yogurt".

Should manufacturers be able to create entirely synthetic food that doesn't contain the core ingredient you might otherwise think it does?

There's already turkey sausage, pork sausage, and "summer" sausage available at my local grocery. Why can't we add plant sausages?

> There's already turkey sausage, pork sausage, and "summer" sausage available at my local grocery. Why can't we add plant sausages?

You should, since "sausage" is the container, not the ingredient.

People get confused. I once bought "I can't believe it's not <huge><bold>Butter</bold></huge>" https://www.google.com/search?q=i+can%27t+believe+it%27s+not... and I was unhappy when I realized the trick.

I think that it makes the most sense to use existing truth in advertising laws to decide on a case by case basis. If a product's branding is setup to create confusion like that, then I think it's reasonable to sanction the company. A similar gray area I've seen is a vegan chicken product called something like "chikn"; overall I doubt it confused people much, but I wouldn't be opposed to the government telling them to name it something else.

However, I don't think this sort of law that tries to proscribe for every situation is needed. The majority of vegan meats that I've seen have been obvious.

I think that is already banned.

Or at least a product in Finland had to go from "voi"mariini to "oiva"riini a years ago. From butter to fine. And this product was mix of butter and margarine. (BTW, for my taste superior to butter).

The language has stagnated in many areas. Meat is flesh.

Maybe we can call vegetable products that try to emulate meat: veat, in English anyway. There's probably already a term that has fallen out of common usage, maybe we can look it up.

> veat

Pronounced as wheat? Pick something else please.

not OP but: pronounced as as veat, as in vegetable. They were clear to say for English speakers.

Many people refer to the flesh of the fruit vs the skin vs the seed.

It seems to me that there's a long history of using "meat" and "flesh" for things that don't come from animals. For example, the common name for the edible solid and liquid parts of coconuts are the coconut meat and milk respectively. More broadly, it's common to refer to the pulpy edible part of fruits as the fruit's "meat" or "flesh" respectively.

There are also lots of people who don't recognize meat from fish as meat for some reason.

Other examples of food names that could be misleading or where changed for marketing purposes: orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, headcheese, mountain oysters, crab sticks, fruit leather, black pudding, and astronaut ice cream.

> The language has stagnated in many areas. Meat is flesh.

The soft part of a fruit or a plant that you eat is also called flesh.

The soft part of a nut that you eat from inside the shell that you is called nutmeat.

In English we've used 'meaty' words to describe plants for over a century.

And soy and almond milk has been called as such for centuries. We call lots of inedible white saps milk too.

Good idea; bad example.

> This quote puts it quite succinctly: “Do people confuse motor oil, olive oil and jojoba oil? I think not. No more than they confuse vegan steak from beef steak.”

I've met people here in France who did not know what "vegan" means. They also have the word "végétalien" (as opposed to "végétarien"), even less known. So "vegan meat" might not register with a lot of folks.

> Do people confuse motor oil, olive oil and jojoba oil? I think not. No more than they confuse vegan steak from beef steak.

No they don't confuse them because there's nothing to confuse, they _are_ all oil, just different types.

Plant meat however, is not meat. I can absolutely imagine someone confusing vegan steak as real steak, because I see people do far stupider things on a weekly basis.

But my question is: if they don't care at all to look at what they're buying, why do they care that they bought a vegan steak? It's still their fault and it's still food.

> if they don't care at all to look at what they're buying

If you mean they don't care enough to check what they're buying, I'd say they care, and have "checked" to a _reasonable_ degree. This is the crux of this entire issue: The "reasonable" part is moving to small print, where as people are used to the words "steak" and "meat" meaning something different to what marketers are using them for now.

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