“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?
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” – George Carlin
70% is pretty good, sadly.
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.
Well now blood sausage is not a sausage too despite being almost entirely animal product
The EU document specifically mentions that blood based products counts as meat, so blood sausage is fine.
That’s fucking stupid. Blood isn’t meat, it’s blood. How can something liquid be meat?
In the end it’s a legal document and the terms are defined for the purpose of the regulation, not necessarily how the terms are used in daily life.
Is milk and honey also a meat product? they are stored/produced in the animal too, like blood. Can I call it sausage if I fill a casing with them?
It’d be ironic to be able to call “sausage” to something that tastes and feels nothing like a sausage just because it happens to come from an animal… but being unable to call sausage to something that does look and taste like a sausage but happens to not come from an animal.
Hot take, I don’t think legal documents should get a pass to redefine words and use them differently than how they’re used in daily life. I’m sure they do it on purpose specifically to make it harder for laymen to parse those types of documents, which is stupid.
It would be easier and clearer to write this regulatory document using common parlance, and then we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
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.
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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.
So we should call them vegetarian protein cylinders instead of sausages?
I’m a meat eater and I don’t even see much point in this ruling. Basically all the plant-based steak or burger alternatives I’ve seen have been clearly labeled as such. Stores usually separate them from meat-based products anyway, so that vegans and vegetarians could more easily find what they’re looking for.
I’m really glad that we don’t have more serious problems to deal, than this.
Good to see the parliament tackling the most pressing issues.
Seems a bit idiotic to me. So what’s a burger with veggie substitutes supposed to be called? Vegger?
Are veggie patties really sold as “Burgers” in the EU? A Burger is technically a dish, it deppends what you put in it, as far as I understand. You can have an Egg burger, or a turd burger.
Fuck the meat industry, btw. If it’s dying - time to get a “real” job. Free market and all.
Cause the world isnt burning and you can spend time to worry about this shite
How quickly Lemmy turns on the EU when they do something you don’t like. “Vegan burger” doesn’t tell me what’s in it. Could be fucking sawdust.
Steakn’t
I’d argue that if a hamburger is not made in Hamburg, it should not be able to be named anything better than “sparkling patty disher”
Sausage will always remain a form. It is even more apparent in German you dumb Kackwürste.
Overpaid morons. You could put them out of work right now and it would only be beneficial.
IIRC they suggested “tube” instead of “sausage”. So I guess we are now renaming them to tube dogs.
You tube!
2025: You Tube is now a product available from both Google and Soylent Green.
Seems like a relatively pro-consumer policy for so many people to be upset about it. They’re not banning Beyond burgers or mushroom steak. It’s still going to taste the same and have the same distribution network.
They just have to alter the label. In the US a “slider”, “whopper”, “quarter pounder”, and “baconator” are among the most popular burgers and not one of them needs the word burger in it’s marketing.
Sure, it’s not really solving a problem, but it’s ensuring more informative labeling. Proprietary phone charging cables weren’t a real problem either, but it felt like everyone was glad when the EU standardized it.
“Steek and Bergers”?
