The use of the word sausage, bacon and steak to describe plant-based vegan replicas should be prohibited, say, food advisors, retail professionals, agriculturalists and butchers.
In the week of World Vegan Day on November 1, plant producers were accused of using meat terms as a marketing gimmick to increase sales.
Experts said Britain should follow France, which is shifting towards a prohibition on words such as sausage and steak for the vegetarian version of meat products.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the Centre for Retail Research, who lived as a vegetarian for 20 years, said that there should be a new rule saying vegan products can’t be called sausages, steaks or bacon and that we should follow what the French are doing.
He said that you’d think Trading Standards would have been onto it already, as what it says on the container is what should be inside.
He said this wasn’t an argument against people eating vegan food, but the idea you can call a product whatever you like, irrespective of what’s inside which goes against labelling laws, and that research shows some vegan products are extremely refined.
He said that calling something a veggie sausage was a sales tactic as the producer believes it will sell more than if it’s called a vegan stick, and he said that it was equal to if you said a product was made in France when it was actually made in Wales, the authorities would come down on them like a ton of hot bricks.
Nellie Nichols, one of Britain’s leading food consultants, who works with manufacturers and retailers, said that producers should be forthcoming about which products are used and that they should admit that it’s not a meat product but a vegetable product and try not to pull the wool over consumer’s eyes.
She said they need to make it explicit that the product they’re copying is from pea or soya protein and not say it’s a version of a sausage.
This is a marketing challenge and will likely become a legal challenge. However, the smart way around it is to say that something isn’t what you believe it is by stating ‘This isn’t…’
As things stand we should be eating more than twice as much veg as we do.
But now farmers have called for clear, detailed labelling to help shoppers understand where the products have come from so that they can make informed decisions on the food that they purchase.
But while people are whining about plant-based gimmicks, what we should be talking about that people eat every day of the week is mechanically reclaimed separated meat that you get in most shops – how about labelling those up as well?
No one owns the word sausage or burger, it’s just a word which is simply illustrative.
I mean, what is a sausage? It’s a cylinder shape, loaded with animal flesh or plant-based ingredients, but if it’s plant-based, then it should say that it’s plant-based and there is no meat in it. What you call it is irrelevant so long as it says on the package that it has no meat.
To be fair it sounds like farmers are feeling slightly threatened – they should but not because it’s plant-based but because eventually farmers will not exist with all the GMO foods and reconstituted foods that we see in our supermarkets, but eventually we will see no meat at all.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 