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This used to be a witty title but some pro-censorship arse complained so here we are
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Oh I'm sure the incredibly powerful lobby you are speaking about will be totally fine with a law dictating the way they style and display their packaging.
Also the pure nightmare of implementing in law what you say for a wide range of products. Let's say I want to sell an individual vegan "steak" but I can't put a large packaging just for the label ?
Also, the purposefully misleading labels in the food industry is already pretty common so I think I'm not exaggerating when I say than any gap in the law will be abused.
And it's again extremely difficult to protect one single word without it's context.
For instance, in steaks we usually try to have the amount of fat in it because it gives you an indication of the amount of actual meat in your steak. Because I could wildly vary the amount and sell you 0.1% meat steaks that is actually vegetables which is much cheaper. It is not the first time that the food industry has tried to sell litteral fake meat. It's an expensive product and if you can make it for cheap and keep at the same price it's obviously worth it.
What I genuinely don't understand is why vegan products are trying so hard to look like non vegan products?
Is it important for a bunch of vegetables composition to be called a steak ? If anything I would think a vegan product would want to stand out from standard meat ?
You won't convert to veganism people by selling them fake steaks. It doesn't work.
You achieve so much more teaching kids that eatings meals without meat is fine and we are starting to do it in schools.
But thinking someone that ate meat all his life will become vegan because he found this wonderful vegan steak is imo quite delusional and missing the point.
Food industry wants to sell you a product not matter how. Less restrictions for them is not a good news.
I don't care what they're okay with. They're okay with passing this BS law as though it's solving their fictional problem, because the actual problem is that they're losing money to alternatives people are choosing on purpose.
For the same reason there's non-alcoholic beer. It's accepted as a social norm that creates what Warren Buffet would call a "moat" around their business, like the barbecue. If everyone else is eating burgers and hot dogs but you have a moral issue with eating meat, you can still partake. Maybe you hate that so much of our food comes from animals but you really like cheese, so you'll deal with something that gets 80% of the way there. Beyond and Impossible are two businesses that exist specifically because people care about the burger taste but would love to do so without killing a cow to get there.
It's important that they know they're getting something that approximates a steak, and it stands out by putting the word "vegan" or "plant-based" or "vegetarian" in front of it, but this legislation hurts that.
I don't think it was ever their business model to get people who wanted a meat steak to buy the veggie version. But it is there for people who want to be vegetarian and would miss being able to eat a steak.