Another shitty lobby demand became regulation just like that. Besides, protecting the label „burger“? Really? You know what I‘ll just call them sandwiches from now on. Fuck that.
It’s an odd one, because we’ve had veggie burgers for as long as I can remember.
Exactly. Veggie burgers are waaay older than any “plant based meat” products. Haloumi is at least 500 years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were haloumi burgers before the word burger existed. And I can’t imaging it took long after the word became used for meat sandwiches, someone also used it for a vegetarian variant.
There’s at least two more votes at different levels before this becomes regulation.
People don’t really understand how EU works
To be fair, the media usually does a real shit job of explaining it.
That’s true
You can still call them burger. You just cannot sell them as burgers. So unless you sell vegan burgers for a living, this does not affect you whatsoever.
I mean, it’ll be harder to search for “burger” on my supermarket’s website to find vegetarian alternatives to burgers. They’ll get more expensive because they have to relabel things. And my EP representatives have to waste their time on this instead of important issues.
Nah fuck that. They‘re just sandwiches anyway. This might not affect me directly but it‘s still bullshit overregulation and should be boycotted because who is to tell where it will end? Next thing you know they prohibit gender speech as well. I hate everything about this.
Next thing you know they prohibit gender speech as well.
In some german states they already have prohibit gender speech in public institutions, including schools and universities.
It does affect me to know that my tax money is used by these bunch of fucks to discuss bullshit like that.
My grandma died of anemia because she was unfed in her retirement home but these bunch of privilege motherfuckers have the time to discuss vegan burgers? Bitch please
A lot of companies sell vegan burgers, though.
If they have a line of burgers, some of which have meat in them and some don’t, what are they supposed to do? Keep two different brands separately, putting their fish, chicken and bovine burgers under one brand and others under another? Or just ditch the word “burger” altogether?
It’s affecting me that I’m paying 50% income tax to pay for a bunch of crony politicians to chitchat about such bullshit
Meanwhile Brussels city just scrapped the money to shelter homeless when it’s freezing
This stinks of (rotten) meat lobby.
I hope the meat substitute industry comes up with some kind of ‘it’s not meat’ marketing campaign to counter this.
It worked for oat milk. I’m buying “no milk” all the time 😅
NOT M!LK :)
I hope the meat substitute industry comes up with some kind of ‘it’s not meat’ marketing campaign to counter this.
Well, honestly it would be fucking time they come out with some name that not mimic the meat products name.
A company here just calls everything Salmo’n, Chicke’n and so on, technically it isn’t the actual word.
That seems pretty scummy and misleading. I’m not a fan of the restrictive naming Iike in the article, but the name shouldn’t try to mislead either.
A burger is more about the form, same even for sausage, steak is more gray area, something like “veggie minced meat” or stuff with “meat” in the name is a no-no imo
Okay, I like it as I am looking for replacements for salmon or chicken. So if they start calling their burger burge’r to circument such rules I wouldn’t mind.
I get how similar naming can be useful in knowing what sort of product you’re getting and what it can be used to replace, but I dislike more how it is purposefully misleading. Shouldn’t be allowed to call it that close to salmon without it containing any salmon. Same for other similar ingredient names where there’s a chance of confusion.
A meat product being quirky and inverting the m so it is marketed as w’eat would just be… No.
Praise the lord.
Congrats to the meat-farmers and -industry! It shows you are “winning” the game against vegetarians and vegans. Now you can finally stop your usual whining about subsidies and the like - everything solved eh?
Praise the lord
meat-farmer
Hah
EU parliamentarians are so far up their ass, they can’t even see the big ass VEGAN logo that is on every vegan meat replacement product
So why not call it a vegan patty or something similar. This is ultimately a regional issue as every region will hold meaning of labels differently.
Often they’re specifically meat replacement products so being able to call it as closely the product they’re meant to be replacing as possible is useful for them. Tells the consumer what kind of product it is and so on. Though that same thing can lead consumers to expect a different product to what they’re getting.
What do you think we should call vegan sausage? And why is it a problem to call it vegan sausage?
Haha yeah awesome real problems getting solved by serious politicians here, guys! If you can actually get your hands on any real meat without paying an arm and a leg for it what the actual fuck are we doing here lads what the fuck are these fucking politicians doing???
The world is on fire, the economy is in the shitter globally, there are multiple ongoing genocides, facism is on the rise again, and we’re wiggling our dicks around talking about whether you can call veggie burgers “burgers”? Are you serious? WHO CARES???
Is this bring your kid to work day and they let the kids do a vote for a change instead as a treat? Is this a joke?? What motherfucker is getting into politics to make sure “hey those damn vegans better not call anything a burger”.
These poncy little briefcase-botherers need a hobby or something because this is absolutely the biggest case of dicking around on the job I’ve ever heard of. Ridiculous. Stupid. A joke. Pathetic. Childish. Vapid. Can we get some adults in the EU Parliament please?
Or.
We could tackle multiple problems at once. Why does it have to be a this-or-that thing?
This is in a very literal way not a problem though. They were just bribed by the meat industry.
Because resources must be prioritized. There simply are more pressing matters to tend to.
This is a non-issue and should have the lowest priority as it’s pandering to a lobby and will likely result in backfiring because more creative names will pop up, possibly leading to even more acceptance of vegan products 😁
I’m paying 50% income taxes to pay for a bunch of cronies to chitchat about this bullcrap. Meanwhile they just scraped the money to shelter homeless people during winter
I’m totally in favour of solving multiple problems at once.
Personally, I do not view this as a problem. My issue is with the EU Parliament wasting time with this in place of anything that I perceive as an actual problem.
If you think that calling veggie burgers “burgers” is a problem worth their time and effort, more power to you 👍
why are they doing this shit when there are so many problems in the world?
because they already participated in those problems.
In reality, it’s because the farming lobby is the biggest lobby inside the EU. This is an easy “win” that MEPs can use to get beef farmers to vote for them again.
Same reason CAP will never be reformed.
Welcome to the European Union. Solving non-issues is what they do all day.
This is just stupid. Make it clear the product doesn’t have meat in it. It’s not that hard. Surely people can’t be confused by veggie burger vs burger?
Current labelling is correctly understood by 70% of sampled population according to the article. That’s lower than I would have expected.
You underestimate how stupid the average person is.
I went vegetarian two years ago and cannot for the life of me fathom how one cannot differentiate… That said, I’m from Sweden and products in other countries might be marketed differently so I wouldn’t be able to say, but still.
Yeah but imagine you want to buy some factory meat and realise at home that they didn’t even torture animals for the patty that you bought? The horror.
I mean imagine the confusion the other way around. Some scummy company was misleading you into thinking your buying a veggie patty but instead you bought a (meat) steak. Obviously nobody is happy about a product misleading them like that.
I’d go a step further and require labeling meat as having come from an animal. So the source of food would have to precede the term, such as “cow burger”, “pig burger”. Can do the same for milk. Make all dairy farmers put “cow milk” rather than just “milk”. It’s way less confusing that way. Include a warning that the product contains lactose. Instead of a logo to signify vegetarian products, make one to signify animal products. Use the silhouette of a horse or something.
Never underestimate what people can get confused about. People will also still buy veggie burgers expecting them to have meat, after they would be relabeled eventually.
It’s an excuse. A bullshit one. The real reason for this “problem” being addressed is that the meat industry is threatened, and lobbies hard to fight the plant based industry.
But they will lose, eventually.
I’ve seen vegetarian minced meat type thing that had it like this
veggie minced meat product
Seemed kinda silly, you’d think being a veggie thing would’ve been a value add selling point
Fucking idiots. Almost nobody is able to decipher the ingredients including E numbers, but people are confused by “burger”
this has nothing to do with people being confused, and everything with meat industry being worried about their profits
I know. Tönnies sei dank
Finally EU is back innovating! Oh wait 🤦♂️
another useless legislation, like how in the US, klobaucher wanted to do a “flag” legislation.
Seems a bit strange to expect EU Parliament to be an innovative body
I’m sure this critical decision will help us.
Can we change the title to “meat industry has been nagging about this non issue for years now, so the babies are finally getting their non issue resolved?”
Ffs sell your product but don’t be a bitch about that tiny speck of competition.
that tiny speck of competition.
It’s not that tiny anymore. The number of people choosing non-meat options is growing faster and faster as people realize that meat is expensive and bad for your health but the plant based alternatives are cheaper and good for you.
Also bad for your health in the long run, because meat is heating up the atmosphere and outcompetes nature that would otherwise store CO2.
yes but lets not pretend impossible burgers are a health food. they’re great but just like cow burgers i wouldn’t recommend eating them as a staple of your diet
All the vegans and vegetarians I know don’t eat impossible burgers very often at all, they’re more into actual vegan and vegetarian food.
This is going to backfire in a major way for them. Once we come up with new names for the vegan stuff that are generally accepted, the old stuff will look decidedly outdated.
did it work for milk? it won’t backfire.
they know what they’re doing - they’re trying to create an artificial distance between meat and modern plant alternatives. Can’t blame them for trying but the government should not be so happy to do their bidding.
Veggie burgers have been around since the 1940s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veggie_burger
The Morningstar ones are damn good too. I think they’re black bean based.
Much better than the Impossible to eat burger.
Ayyy morningstar
What a great Democratic organ taking care of the true problems of the days /s
It’s not like they can’t do several things at once. Small things add up.
Bullshit. I’m not paying 50% taxes so a bunch of idiot can whine about “fake meat”.
How are you paying 50% taxes lol especially towards the EU
I don’t have a company car
huh?
That’s not how it works. You don’t pay 50% taxes to have that.
I understand you think it’s not something you’d like the EU to spend money on, but this whole “I pay loads of taxes For This?!” is just making the discussion become quite low level IMO.
Yeah well I remember you’re a genocide supporter so…
Still higher than you
True, but of all the things to focus on, this is utterly ridiculous.
Nothing is perfect, and if this is the worst thing about the EU then it’s kind of good IMO.
“Our data shows that almost 70% of European consumers understand these names as long as products are clearly labelled vegan or vegetarian,”
How fucking stupid are your customers if “almost 70%” can work out that a vegan sausage doesn’t contain meat?
But honestly, the vegan sausages and steaks are not sausages and stakes, even if they are still ultra-processed like their meat counterparts. They really should invent different names that are used for these products.
Why?
I want something vegan that looks and tastes like sausage. I want to have an easy time finding such a product in the store. I look for a product that says “I’m basically a sausage, but vegan”. I buy a vegan sausage.
What’s the problem with that?
How would they even define a sausage anyway, meat content? Well now blood sausage is not a sausage too despite being almost entirely animal product - probably more than most sausages actually given how much filler they put in them.
Or shall we rename all the cheap sausages in shops to “emulsified high fat offal tubes” to more accurately describe them?
And blood sausage is a very good example to show that “sausage” is an established appendix to show the shape of something, while specifying what it’s made of with a term beforehand. Pork sausage. Beef sausage. Turkey sausage. Blood sausage. This works so well that I can invent words of artificial things and still convey what I mean by that: Paper sausage. Ice sausage. Cloth sausage. Glass sausage. …Chickpea sausage. Broccoli sausage. Bean sausage.
It’s a non-brainer. The legislators are being deliberately obtuse here.
Also traditionally it would’ve been in an intestine, but they’ve been making other sorts of casings for meat-based sausages for a while anyway, so that argument against plant based sausages is dead in the water too IMO
Where do you live that blood sausage has more animal product than regular sausages (where the filler is often bone mass and such)? Blood sausage filler where I come from is usually barley groats (or some other format of barley. Barley is really universal apparently).
Picked out a random one they sell here. Contents: barley groats, “food blood” (19%), pork rind, pork (8%), roasted onion, pork fat, salt, various spices
These are generally listed in rough order of importance, so blood sausage is basically more barley groats than animal products.
Now for comparison, the cheapest smoked sausage out there (the sandwich sausage variety, not grill or oven). Contents: chicken meat mass (39%), pork (18%), pork fat, water, cheese (6%), various shit you don’t even want to think or know about.
It’s utterly cheap shit (the chicken meat mass of course includes shit like soft-ish bones ground up, etc), but even this is more animal-y than blood sausages.
Or shall we rename all the cheap sausages in shops to “emulsified high fat offal tubes” to more accurately describe them?
Nah, this would hurt meat lobbyist’ feelings.
I am all for allowing vegan sausages to just be called sausage. But I am not the biggest fan of vegan steaks getring the same treatment. Mostly just because a steak is by definition a slice of meat. Patties are fine since they are just ground minced stuff made into a certain shape kinda like sausages.
Don’t really care about steaks, but burgers, sausages and many others are really established with their veggie and vegan variants. It’s completely nonsensical to ban them.
I mean you can just call the burgers “patties” which we do in my country anyway. Burger refers to the whole sandwich, not the patty. If they regulate the word “patty” to require meat, I hope farmers will drop cow patties at their doorsteps.
Not a fan of them doing it to the word sausage though, it’s clearly a form factor above all else.
But a restaurant should be allowed to sell me a veggie burger. Why on earth should we call it a burger for beef patties, chicken patties, veal patties and fish patties, but not for bean patties, veggie patties or plant based meat patties like impossible? The only thing different to a “burger” are ingredients which are already swapped out for different ones on a regular basis.
Tbh chicken, fish, pork should also not count as burger if they want to actually preserve purity.
Personally I think the burger should refer to the shape of the sandwich, regardless of what you put inside it, and we should call the patty a patty, regardless of what it’s made of. This luckily is what we’re doing where I live, but if that means that restaurant-prepared veggie burger can’t be called a veggie burger, that’s bullshit. I thought it meant specifically the patties (which in American are called burgers and if anyone has authority on naming here it’s the Americans, as they’ve perfected the art of fa(s)t foods).
What I’m interested in is - how is this supposed to work with all the different languages in all EU countries? For example in finnish “steak” and “patty” both translate as “pihvi”. On top of that words like “kasvispihvi” (vegetable steak/patty) have been in use since early 1900s. Why the hell should EU be able to affect our language to a degree of banning commonly used words everyone understands? Absolutely nobody would think kasvispihvi contains meat, and it’s absurd to even suggest that it couldn’t be used in marketing
The definition even includes “turtle steak” which I didn’t even know was a thing… and also fish, which has very different taste and properties than beef steak, for example. I feel that the labeling of “steak” should always come with what is the steak made of anyway… and once you do that then I don’t see what’s the harm of allowing for more exotic sources of protein.
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So we should call them vegetarian protein cylinders instead of sausages?
It’s only a burger if it comes from the municipality of Cheeseberg.
Cool still not buying dead animal
This is what seems crazy to me, surely no one is changing what they buy based on this and who is really so dumb that they were confused by the vegan sausage not containing meat?
And even if, no one dies of eating a vegan sausage by mistake.
Not true. I made my racist uncle eat a vegan sausage once and he was almost offended to death
Generally no, but food allergies could cause death depending on the vegan alternative contents. Have a severe allergy to wheat, seitan is a no-go. Have a severe allergy to legumes, chickpeas and bean altertanives are a no-go.
However, I’ve never seen vegan alternatives not clearly labeled as vegan or meat alternative is some very obvious way. And the people I know with allergies severe enough to cause severe reactions read the ingredients carefully of everything they buy. And ask what’s in things before eating something prepared by somebody else.
