Make up your own new word for the new product. Tufu isn't "bean cheese".
People don't need "to be fooled" in order to get them to try highly processed plant products. Truth in advertising and all that.
If you're selling processed plants or insects, great, market it and label it as such. If it's yummy, people will lap it up.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/meat
We've used "meat" to describe lots of things that we eat for a very long time. This is purely bending the knee to a lobby and hyper regulation of enterprise. It makes sense since that's a core value of republican... wait a second! What's happening? What about free enterprise and not having to do things that go against your personal values in business, like serving The Gays or paying for birth control????
Nobody is fooled. It's called "Beyond Beef," not "Beef." This regulation would make it illegal to label something as "Not Chicken" because lobbyist convinced the state that Texans are too stupid and illiterate to recognize anything but the word "Chicken." Frankly, this law is f'ing insulting. I live in Texas and I know how to read.
Full disclosure: I'm not vegan or even vegetarian.
Reminds me of this bit from an underrated sitcom I binged a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN4V_tgXuNY
I'm surprised the lawmakers didn't try to regulate "tuna steaks" out of existence.
That's not a very good argument. Those other uses are only valid in very specific contexts. If someone ordered "extra meat" for their sandwich, and the restaurant threw in some apple slices (as in meat = "the edible part of anything, as a fruit or nut"), pretty much everyone would find that to be scammy.
> Nobody is fooled. It's called "Beyond Beef," not "Beef."
Yet. This fake "beef" is currently a trendy novelty product. If/when it becomes cheaper than real beef, I guarantee you that there will be concerted attempts to trick people into buying it.
These kinds of naming standards are necessary. For instance the difference between "frozen dairy dessert" and "ice cream" (which as a specific government enforced definition). They're both marketed like ice cream, but if I see the former label, I know not to buy it because it's cost-reduced crap (e.g. they whipped so much air into it it can't be called ice cream anymore).
Do we need to make up a new word for “chunks of bovine muscle tissue” if it wasn’t cut out of a whole-ish cow?
Sounds to me like it’s about entrenched farming interests throwing red tape at a perceived threat, not “truth in advertising”. No plant burger or vegan cheeze on the market is nefariously hiding their true identity. They actively market their non-meat-ness, to appeal to their main demographic of meat-avoiders, in big green letters on their packaging. There’s no confusion between their earthy/futurey brand names, versus the old-fashioned-farmer style branding of their slaughtered-animal (their words!) counterparts.
I imagine cheap meat is going to be qualitatively different than cheap Meetabix or whatever they will call it for some years. “It came from a cow” will impose some kind of minimum quality standard — and it’s not clear that standard will always be met in a non standardized market of bovine cell growers.
And the inputs are different. Should an increase in cow meat futures drive up grain prices or plastic clamshell prices?
New synthetic materials though should find their own nouns to use and not coöpt terms with longstanding meanings.
Mayonnaise is just a dressing like thousand island, Russian, ranch and hundreds of others who acquired their own names.
Yogurt I'm mildly ok with since basically it just means coagulated milk and also includes the necessary bacteria.
no such thing exists.
Velveeta can't even be called “cheese spread” despite having more similarity to any reasonable definition of that term than any non-dairy simulant has to yogurt. If people want to sell and buy plant-based yogurt-style products, that’s fine, but sellers of sich goods shouldn’t expect to be allowed to call them “yogurt”.
Meat does not just mean the muscle fiber of an animal.
I wonder how opposed Texas was to what people call “American cheese”, now just called “American” because of the FDA.
What about negations? Is it now illegal to call something “fake meat”?
What about “I can’t believe it’s not butter”? Is that legal in Texas?
The lengths to which Texas politicians will go to protect their masters is crazy.
Moreover, Chinese word creation clobs disconnected words together to make new words. Fire + chicken = Turkey, Fire + Car = Locomotive/Train, Fly + Machine = Aircraft, etc. So this is not out of the ordinary for Chinese word creation.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%85%90 - to rot; to decay; to spoil
I let google autocomplete "Beyond" and found "Beyond Bread." Without looking, and without previous brand recognition, tell me what "beyond" bread means.
Meanwhile I don't see Texas aggressively defending the truth that a tomato is really a fruit and shouldn't be placed with other vegetables in the store.
It seems like it's a broken legislature being right twice a day kind of thing. They're proposing it for reactionary reasons but it will address a real consumer rights issue in the future.
More than likely a few lawmakers got generous donations from Tyson, Cargill et all
Tyson looks forward to selling you chicken-a-la-vat, and will pay handily to get a federal exception to this rule in a few years.
It's going to be a fun game of whackamole as Beyond Meat starts producing "steak", "fillets", "bacon", etc and other things not explicitly listed in that bill.
OLIVE OIL??? VEGETABLE OIL?? HOW THE HELL CAN THEY CALL IT OIL WHEN IT'S NOT FROM THE FAKE DINO BONUS JESUS PLANTED IN THE DIRT THAT WE USE TO MAKE THE CARS GO?!?!?!
Companies like Beyond Meat are producing products that the aspire to taste just like beef. This is one of the first laws I expected to see, because it's standard practice based on precedent.
0: https://www.realcaliforniamilk.com/real-california/frozen-yo...
Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.”
Abraham Lincoln
In any case, if your premise that people are not silly is correct, surely they don't need to be protected from confusing animal meat with meat substitutes.
Society as a whole seems to be progressing towards a lower meat intake diet, so I would think it's likely that new and existing brands of meat alternatives will continue to do well.
Talking about “hamburger” is laughable, as ground-up people from Hamburg is forbidden by most culinary guidelines. Waiting for the hammer to fall on hot dog labelling.
I guess that depends, is it an apple sandwich or a chicken sandwich? Context clues come into play. If I ordered a Beyond Beef sandwich and asked for extra meat, do you think I'd be asking for pork?
> is currently a trendy novelty product.
Your bias is showing. Nobody looking at the actual market would agree. Major players in factory farming are getting into the act. They not only don't see it as a novelty but also they see how good the margins are.
> when it becomes cheaper than real beef, I guarantee you that there will be concerted attempts to trick people into buying it.
Why would there need to be an effort to trick people and why would it be the non animal products doing the tricking? When it becomes cheaper then animal based meats, wouldn't it be the ranching industry that would benefit from market manipulation?
> I know not to buy it because it's cost-reduced crap
Cool. Biased and loudly subjective. Double points.
I get it. You've put some part of your personal identity politics on making sure people know what you eat. Your arguments are broken though. This is the type of rhetoric that stems from a fragile ego. I'm not saying your ego is fragile but it's whipped so full of air that it can't be called confident any more. (See what I did there?)
The "fu" in doufu taken by itself does indeed mean rotten. But characters on their own can have very different meanings compared to when used in combination in words. There isn't necessarily a connection, just like in English the word "rotten" doesn't have anything to do with the number 10 that's contained in it.
Tofu isn't fermented but made by boiling soy milk and adding a coagulating agent. I was curious and looked it up and that process was described the same way already in Ming Dynasty, so the "rotten" character might just be random and not have any such meaning. It's very common in Chinese that new concepts are expressed with existing characters, because you can't go around making up a new character for everything, no one could ever remember that many characters (bad enough as it is). Often it's just about the sound. For example the characters in the word for cheese (起司) mean "rise" and "manage" when taken on their own. It would be gibberish to read it that way, but every Chinese person knows combined they mean cheese.
It's handy to know when you are in substitutes section and seeing what is what. Hijacking SKU is fraud.
I brought it up because the GP said "tofu is not bean cheese" when that's almost exactly what tofu means.
Without that, it looks less like a matter of evenhanded regulatory enforcement or consumer protection, and more like a legislature beholden to a corporation.
People recognize a brand by the label. A label change is precisely the kind of thing that would negatively impact brand recognition.
> I'm sure the marketing teams will come up with something to assist with new customers.
That costs money. Hence the unfair burden.