What Gets to Be a 'Burger'? States Restrict Labels on Plant-Based Meat

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/07/23/744083270/what-gets-to-be-a-burger-states-restrict-labels-on-plant-based-meat

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

31 86 7 years ago

npr.org

CannisterFlux• 7 years ago

Perhaps labeling these non-animal products as something other than meat might be a good thing.

Long term, I think we animal-eaters are on the wrong side of history. Providing humans survive the climate crisis and collapse of civilization, maybe a couple of hundred years from now the people will look back at us and wonder how we could consider ourselves civilized while killing and eating animals. A bit like Roman gladiator fights. It will seem very shocking to them.

The alternatives, lab-grown meat and whatnot, will be the norm and only psychopaths would kill and eat animals. With that in mind, if these products start to distance themselves from real (killed-animal) meat now then they are getting a head start on marketing. They won't have to remind people later that they were the good guys all along.

zamadatix• 7 years ago

I don't think it will be the "wrong side of history" any more than using animals for transport prior to technology. It's not purel= senseless violence it's just the best way to make meat with the current technology, it'll probably be looked back on as "haha remember when they had to raise and keep an animal purely to transport them slowly".

hannasanarion2• 7 years ago

Animals raised for transportation or muscle power were treated much better than meat animals are today. They also provided utility throughout their lives, while meat animals are raised for the exclusive purpose of slaughter.

skidd0• 7 years ago

Not disagreeing, but providing a different perspective. By maintaining labels that associate lab-grown or plant-based with the "real-deal" (not a "fake" or new/different) meats, perhaps more people would be willing to try the alternatives. People are resistant to change and many stick to what they "know". It's part of why the milk industry is fighting for nut-milks to not be labeled as "real" milk. If the alternative has that "other"/"outsider" label, there's more resistance from the customers.

defulmere• 7 years ago

That milk issue is ridiculous. Nut milk has been referred to as such since the middle ages or earlier.

WhatIsDukkha11• 7 years ago

Your different perspective boils down to "it's ok to lie and mislead people with food labeling if its in a good cause".

So you would like corporate interests to just say whatever they want about the contents just because you THINK it might be better for OTHER people to not know what they are eating?

Pigo3• 7 years ago

Maybe once we evolve into herbivores, we'll look back in disgust. But until then my kids have incisors and eyes on the front of their face, just like their mother and I, and most predators on the planet.

If you want to have a conversation about factory farming and animal cruelty, I'd imagine we'd agree on a lot.

sterkekoffie3• 7 years ago

As flawed as appeals to nature already are, these aren't even particularly good ones. Your incisors are laughably small and dull compared to those of a literal mouse and you have fewer of them than a cow does. Fruit bats and gorillas both have forward-facing eyes and neither would know what to do if you handed them a ribeye.

unreal376• 7 years ago

To be clear, these laws are saying you can't use the word "burger" with anything other than the flesh of animals.

Not meat - burger.

Nobody is being fooled by the "veggie burger" containing animals. Nobody. It's a non-issue.

mikestew• 7 years ago

To open, a few weeks ago I went to Fatburger to get another Impossible Burger. It had been a while, but I remembered that it was good. Fatburger must have gotten their grillin’ chops down, because the whole time I was eating it I wondered if they didn’t mistakenly give me real meat. I didn’t remember it being that good. Whatever, I’m not not that much of a hard-core vegetarian.

But I need a repro, so I went back a week later. That’s when I saw the sign saying, “Meat. Made from plants. <cutesy blurb>”. Vegetarian Me says “yea!”. Truth-in-advertising Me says, “meh, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that”. OTOH, I knew full what they mean.

Oh, and Fatburger didn’t make a mistake the first time. Impossible Burger is just that good.

jfengel2• 7 years ago

I think in a side-by-side test of the bare burger, you'd have no trouble telling which is which.

But most burger chains serve their burgers with an array of toppings, sauces, condiments, and other things that make it nearly impossible to taste the actual patty. There are so many layers that all the burger itself provides is a bit of chewy texture. The texture of an Impossible Burger doesn't have quite the same mouthfeel as one made out of cow, but if you're not expressly looking for it, you'd easily miss it. If they accidentally substituted it for a meat burger, I'd wager well over 80% of the patrons wouldn't notice.

tluyben22• 7 years ago

I think in a side-by-side test of the bare burger

Our supplier of impossible meat gave us bratwursten last time to try and yeah, I would say you will have a very hard time doing blind test between those and the real thing. They are not only simply very good: they are absolutely convincing next to the real thing.

Again, for me they do not need to be but I think our meat consumption is unsustainable and far worse (for me), animal torture, so if this can help others eat /less/ meat, it is good.

Disclaimer; I know most people just do not have the financial room to do this; it is all very expensive (at least here). Nice vegetarian cooking (I do not know if this goes for vegan as well or not) can be done very cheap if you have some time to shop and prepare.

But all these ‘plant based meats’, at least here in the EU, are very expensive. 12 hamburgers from the freezer which are meat (well, some kind of very cheap waste meat) at E4,- vs 10 impossible meat v2 burgers at E33,- it will make no sense for most. But I guess this will change with volume; I hope so anyway.

gamblor956• 7 years ago

Impossible Burger meat is shipped ground-beef style, so the quality of the patty is highly dependent on the restaurant. Among my vegetarian friends, Fatburger is considered on the high-end of the quality scale for Impossible Burgers since making burgers is all they do.

Other burger-centric restaurants also tend to be pretty good at cooking Impossibles, except Umami Burger, which is very bad at it.

tluyben22• 7 years ago

I buy them now frozen and bbq them, serve them with a sauce recipe we (my wife and myself) perfected over the last months + pickles, onion and tomato. Our friends (mainly somewhat anti vegetarian meat eat eaters) do not believe it is not meat (we live in a small village). I have been making lasagne and spaghetti bolognese with mushrooms based meat replacement and no-one ever noticed it was not ground beef (I use different herbs and fatty tasting oils).

For us it does not have to taste like meat at all; we eat different beans, lentils, veggie dishes most of the time, but if we want friends over, we have to serve ‘meat’ so this is a good way of doing that. Or pizza, but after having perfected my woodoven chops over the past 2 years, I need to lay off the pizza for a little bit...

unreal376• 7 years ago

There's a vegan restaurant in town that has "pulled pork sandwich" listed on it's menu. That's misleading when there is no pork in it.

No one needs to be tricked to eat these delicious plant-based proteins.

ssully• 7 years ago

I think the problem is that they are trying to create an alternative to pulled pork, but have no idea what to call it. I have a vegetarian in my family and I have made "vegetarian pulled pork", which is using shredded jack fruit as a meat substitute and cooking it in a pot or pressure cooker. Coming from a family where "pulled pork" means slow cooking a pork shoulder for 8-12 hours, cooking "vegetarian pulled pork" is absolutely nothing like real pulled pork, but what else would you call it? I guess BBQ Shredded Jack Fruit is more accurate, but it doesn't sound nearly as appealing (even though it's actually really tasty!).

moate4• 7 years ago

This is an actual problem. You're calling something that isn't pork pork.

"Burger" isn't as specific. Culturally, people accept that the term "burger" can be modified by other words like "Pork" or "Black Bean" to imply "a patty of <product> meant to be used in the ways you would use a patty".

This isn't about protecting consumers from being tricked. It's about making it harder to communicate what a product is for producers.

xbmcuser• 7 years ago

Yes it is. Around here few different restaurants have added impossible meat as an option. And I have tried it in different forms as a burger patty or as a burrito filling. I can't say that the taste is the exact same as beef but its close enough and its good enough.

jgwil23• 7 years ago

Note the irony of these nominally conservative, pro-free-market states being more than willing to introduce burdensome regulation when it tips the scales in favor of industries they deem worthy of protection.

gottam• 7 years ago

Pro free market is more of a libertarian thing not a conservative thing.

TallGuyShort• 7 years ago

Republicans still think they believe in limited government though. They don't notice the irony when they ask the government to keep the governments hands off the government benefits they like.

dooglius2• 7 years ago

Mis-labeled food laws have been around in all these states for a long time, without, I think, much objection.

unreal376• 7 years ago

I'm 100% in favor of consumers not being misled. Truth in labels.

But veggie burgers have been around for 20 years and nobody has been "fooled" into thinking they are beef. The word burger doesn't mean "cow".

The purpose of these laws is transparent, and it's not "consumer protection".

unreal376• 7 years ago

It's pro "big business" ... as long as that big business is a big employer in their state and is big in helping them get reelected.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Note the irony in a HN commentor complaining about US states regulating things the way Europe regulates things[0].

It's ironic turtles all the way down. ;)

Honestly I don't see this regulation as a bad thing. Having to use some different text on your label costs approximately nothing since you have to have a label of some sort so it's not really burdensome. Stores sell margarine beside the butter. I don't see why they wouldn't sell the beef approximation beside the beef. I'm not the target customer though. I won't be buying this stuff until it's so cheap that they start cutting 80/20 beef with it.

[0] per TFA, Europe has very similar laws about food labeling.

Edit: You people have no sense of humor.

jgwil23• 7 years ago

I don't think the majority of European lawmakers have ever claimed to favor a small-government approach to regulation, so whether it's a good idea or not, there's no hypocrisy there.

RE: burdensomeness of the regulation, another commenter already pointed out the historical usage of the language we're talking about banning. Imagine you spent the last twenty years building your brand around the term "veggie burger." I suspect you would find it burdensome if you suddenly had to change that.

smileysteve• 7 years ago

It'll be really entertaining when they make the law so strict beef that we learn that most "burgers" have too much egg, breading, or beef byproduct to count as a burger.

trentlott3• 7 years ago

Fuck 'em.

Call it a "Vurger".

Let lazy phoneme substitution take care of the rest.

syrrim• 7 years ago

Visited one of these vegan restaurants. Took me a little while to realize everything on the menu was misspelled. They didn't have cheese they had "cheeze", they had "porc" instead of pork, etc. Immediately it felt quite dishonest, but I admit it would be obnoxious to have to qualify everything in a vegan restaurant.

xboxnolifes• 7 years ago

I admit it would be obnoxious to have to qualify everything in a vegan restaurant

For cheese I can understand, but pork is pork. How can you call a non-pig product pork?

merlincorey• 7 years ago

"If [plant-based makers] can't say that it's a black bean burger by using 'burger,' how are they to describe to the consumer what the product is?"

The same way meats intended for burgers are described -- patties.

That's right, you can buy "Beef Patties" right now.

crazygringo3• 7 years ago

But language tradition is important here.

People have been calling it a "veggie burger" for decades now.

Saying it can't be a burger is ridiculous -- it's a kind of burger.

But, I fully support packaging requiring word(s) beforehand in an equal-sized font -- "burger" reserved for beef, while "black bean burger" and "veggie burger" and "quinoa burger" are all fine.

What's bizarre is that beef burger makers see this as a threat worth addressing... like, nobody's accidentally buying veggie burgers.

imsofuture• 7 years ago

I guarantee this is more cultural signaling than a threat the beef industry sees as real.

subpixel• 7 years ago

I disagree, I think the threat is very real. Soon every burger chain will be offering a non-meat burger. Burger King already does.

caymanjim2• 7 years ago

What's bizarre is that beef burger makers see this as a threat worth addressing... like, nobody's accidentally buying veggie burgers.

I think that's exactly what they're worried about, though. There wasn't much chance of confusion before, so it wasn't a big priority. Now that vegetable alternatives like the Impossible "patty" are becoming indistinguishable from beef, they're more concerned. If McDonald's or some other giant purveyor of beef could switch and save money, they would. They're rightly worried about a loss of market as the meat alternatives get better at mocking the real thing.

trentlott3• 7 years ago

The truly amusing part is that they think spending money on labeling issues will do anything to stop it

crazygringo3• 7 years ago

People keep saying "indistinguishable from beef" but oh boy... I literally don't know what burgers these people have been trying.

I've tried them all, including the newest versions, and they're still not even close. They're fine, but still completely different... kind of like how soy milk is fine but certainly doesn't taste anything like cow milk. And I'm certainly not a supertaster or anything...

I'm personally of the opinion we'll have self-driving cars long before we come up with a non-meat burger that is actually as satisfying, in the same ways, as a beef one.

hombre_fatal2• 7 years ago

It's about keeping alternative / status-quo-threatening foods in the "weird" outgroup in consumer minds.

"What type of burger do you want: Beef or bean?" is the opposite of that. But nothing that can't be fixed with some cultural manipulation from up top.

bcoates• 7 years ago

Right now they're being sold as an expensive novelty, but the producers are being open that their business plan is undercut meat on price and move downmarket.

That's a direct threat. Meat producers are probably imagining something like 10% beef / 90% artificial meat filler burgers being the norm for cheap ground beef.

unreal376• 7 years ago

It should be cheaper to produce plants than to raise a cow.

So it won't be long before plant-based protein is cheaper than beef. It's not "undercutting" so much as the fact it's cheaper to produce.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

Ironically, the term "hamburger" might lead someone who doesn't know its origin to expect it's made with ham.

chabes2• 7 years ago

Or that it was grown and bottled in the Hamburg region of France

justin66• 7 years ago

What's bizarre is that beef burger makers see this as a threat worth addressing... like, nobody's accidentally buying veggie burgers.

If they force the sellers of veggie burgers to come up with, and popularize, another term, they cost those guys a little money. There's no principle involved here.

WhatIsDukkha11• 7 years ago

We don't let margarine be called butter.

Why is it suddenly ok/desirable to let corporate interests randomly assign words to highly processed* foods?

Today you think its a great thing that these magic mystery pastes can lie to other people about their contents? Those other people are dumb so it's OK to lie to them about the contents of their burgers?

Tomorrow? Oh we let words not have meaning because we wanted people to eat more plants....now the word chickpeas can mean anything because... oooops.

Create unique product names that aren't lies. Let people seek them out because they taste good and they are better for them.

* I've worked hard to get rid of highly processed food and I'm highly skeptical of adding back these highly processed industrial pastes that vegetarian startups are pushing.

dehrmann2• 7 years ago

corporate interests...highly processed

Using phrases like that might pander to a certain crowd, but it doesn't help your argument. Personally, I'm less likely to trust someone who uses phrases like that because they lack nuance and signal that they're not really here for a constructive discussion.

WhatIsDukkha11• 7 years ago

I'm sorry are these not corporate interests?

Are these not highly processed foods?

Is it difficult for you to accept that because you want others to not eat meat?

hombre_fatal2• 7 years ago

Your post history shows that you do this a lot. Just wanted to let you know:

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WhatIsDukkha11• 7 years ago

Thank you, I'll watch that.

billylindeman• 7 years ago

Look out for the Capslock police. What a weird policy.

chabes2• 7 years ago

We don't let margarine be called butter.

What about “peanut butter”?

WhatIsDukkha11• 7 years ago

What about Almond Milk?

First I'd say its in long use and common understanding.

Second you can make both of them at home.

Third I'm really broadly objecting to highly processed food pastes being labeled as "burger" or X. I also object to Taco Bell being able to call their products even "meat" to be quite honest, I think we should change that.

moate4• 7 years ago

Cool slippery slope bro!

Margarine =/= butter. These are words with very specific meanings that everyone has agreed on.

Burger =/= beef. "Burger" is, generally, a style of sandwich. "Turkey Burger" is fine. "Pork burger" is fine. The assumption is that, unmodified, it means that it contains beef. However, everyone in the US understand that a "black bean burger" doesn't contain beef and instead contains black beans.

Both sides of this fight are just "corporate interests randomly assigning words to foods". The beef industry wants "purity" and the veggie industry wants "common sense". Let's not pretend this is actually about the consumer being protected, because isn't. It's about how to market products.

WhatIsDukkha11• 7 years ago

Burger is ground meat not a sandwich?

"Veggie" in "Veggie Burger" is what exactly? Tell us in detail please.

pooya132• 7 years ago

The ONLY factors that matter when it comes to food are taste, health and price. You can call it a shit sandwich for all I care.

A lot of traditionally foreign foods that have been Americanized are not their authentic version either. For example I’m pretty sure california sushi is not “real” sushi. Such is culture and language. It is not static.

colinmhayes• 7 years ago

I think the rise of plant based meat has shown that ethical sourcing is a huge factor for many people.

nkoren• 7 years ago

We're obviously moving from the "then they laugh at you" stage to the "then they fight you" stage.

pseudolus• 7 years ago

Related link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511902 ("Tofurky takes Arkansas to court over the word 'meat')

ofrzeta• 7 years ago

The meat makers must really be afraid of substitutes when they are lobbying for regulations like these. In Germany they were successful in pushing a new regulation that says that vegetarian sausages must not be called sausages.

What Gets to Be a 'Burger'? States Restrict Labels on Plant-Based Meat

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