The French government issued a decree Tuesday banning the term “steak” on the label of vegetarian products, saying it was reserved for meat alone.
The French government issued a decree Tuesday banning the term “steak” on the label of vegetarian products, saying it was reserved for meat alone.
My point was that the meaning of words is not set in stone, as you apparently believe.
I used the obvious example of mincemeat, a British Christmas speciality you may not be familiar with. It is literally fruit! That’s because in the middle ages, “meat” was commonly understood to refer to all food rather than just animal flesh.
If a whole bunch of people are calling something “meat” in good faith, then eventually you will have to admit that the thing has become “meat”.
Unless of course you have some kind of economic interest at stake, which is the case of the animal-flesh industry.
The food industry in south of europe is well regulated and you better believe the meaning of words does fucking matter. As this recently introduced law proves.
Try to sell fake cheese as Parmigiano Reggiano in Italy (well all of Europe since the DOP applies to the whole union) and you go to jail. He’ll even of you sell a real chese but the milk comes from slightly outside the area specified by the DOP denomination.
Same with Champagne. Want to sell your non alcoholic fermented shoe juice? Fine but you can’t call it Champagne. Words do have meaning. The fact that you don’t know it, or that a group of people mistakenly used them wrong is not okay.
I do not have any economic interest into what you call the animal flesh industry or as it’s universally known, the meat industry. I do like to fucking know what I am buying as a customer without having to spend 20 minutes looking at the packaging.
If you have a great vegetarian or vegan product, find a good name for it without having to piggy back on existing industries and confusing customers.
Just a reminder that we were talking about the extremely generic dictionary noun “meat”, and not “Parmigiano Reggiano” and champagne et al which are indeed regulated terms mainly because they are based on geographic names, but also because their industry lobbyists have a lot of money.
Anyway, you clearly feel fucking strongly about this given how much you need to fucking swear so I hope you fucking feel better.
I do fucking swear a lot yes. And I do feel strongly for food labelling, probably the whole thing ended up in Vegans vs meat eaters though I couldn’t care less what food is mislabelled. And I had the same sort of arguments and downvotes a long time ago about mandatory labelling of GMO products. Fucking hell!
OK but I say you’re being obsessively pedantic about this specific word “meat”. Perhaps English is not your native language but the word “meat” is a very generic word indeed. Unlike the geographic controlled-origin terms, no group is harmed financially when the word “meat” is - in your view - abused. That argument is a non-issue. English is full of ambiguous generic terms which cause no comprehension problems because the context makes clear what they are. No carnivore is going to be tripping up on seitan burgers. They will be labelled as seitan, just as beef burgers are labelled as entrecote or rump or whatever. The word “meat” will probably not even appear on the packet. It’s a non-issue.