MMost of what you eat is sausage. I mean, if we want to be literal about it. Sausage derives from Latin salsicuswhich means “seasoned with salt”. You might think of a sausage as a simple thing, but in this reading it’s everything and nothing, a Borgesian meta-concept that recedes the closer you get to it.
From another perspective, a sausage is an intestine filled with offal, or the macerated parts of an electrocuted or asphyxiated pig or other animal – usually parts you wouldn’t knowingly eat – mixed with other ingredients that, in isolation, you might consider inedible. For some reason it is rarely marketed as such.
But for EU lawmakers, a sausage can now only have one meaning: a cylindrical object containing meat. Regardless, cylindrical objects not containing meat have been marketed under names such as “Glamorgan sausage” (Glamorgan sausage) for at least 150 years. Never mind that even Germans once felt the need to call sausages animal meat sausageto distinguish them from other types. Never mind that almost everyone knows what “veggie sausage,” “vegan sausage,” or “plant-based sausage” means. A recent survey of 20,000 Dutch people found that 96% of them are not confused by such terms, which is probably a higher percentage than those who can easily distinguish left from right. The consumer must at all costs be protected from an imaginary threat.
For the same reason, MEPs decided, hamburgers must also contain meat. Sometimes no one knows why a hamburger is called a hamburger. They were once called “Hamburg steaks”, but no clear connection with Hamburg has been established. Nevertheless, before the term was abbreviated, meat patties were widely known as hamburgers, the literal meaning of which is a Hamburg resident. If “vegetarian burgers” are marketed in a misleading manner, so is any burger that is not made from the ground meat of residents of a northern German town.
Last week, the European Council and the European Commission tried, unsuccessfully, to make sense of it all. They failed to agree on a common position with the European Parliament and postponed the decision until January, when a new Council presidency will have to deal with it. I can’t blame them. We cannot make sense of a senseless policy.
Parliament’s food literalism is remarkably selective. Given the time of year, I should perhaps point out that there is no meat in the minced meat, which is used to fill the tartlets. Many years ago this was the case, but the meat component has gone out of fashion. Minced meat, on the other hand, East meat – I’m sure it’s not confusing. Likewise, sweetbreads are meat, but delicacies are not. None of these terms appear to pose a problem for lawmakers, although they have insisted that the only permitted definition of meat is “edible parts of animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004”, which is, let’s face it, how it is generally understood by buyers across the EU.
If a vegetarian hot dog is to be excluded, as parliamentarians demand, on the grounds that it does not contain meat, the meat version should be excluded on the grounds that it does not contain dog (the hothorse should in some cases be permitted). They might also be shocked to discover that there’s no beef in beef tomatoes, no butterflies in butterfly cakes, no cottage in cottage pie, no babies in jelly babies, or (mostly) fingers in chocolate fingers. And don’t get me started on the buffalo wings.
All of this must be deeply confusing to buyers. Like Wednesday Addams, who, when offered Girl Scout cookies, asked if they contained real Girl Scouts, we wonder every day what these names really mean. Human beings are completely incapable of recognizing forms, derived and secondary meanings, metaphors or conceptualizations. Language never evolves, neither does food. This is why, when faced with “pigs in blankets,” “toads in the hole,” or “spotted dicks,” people cower on the ground, bang their heads, and moan weakly (OK, there may be other reasons). Everything can only have one meaning, and this meaning must be what the legislators say.
If you are thinking of the “benefits of Brexit”, I am sorry to disillusion you. If the European Council and Commission ultimately decide that terms such as veggie burgers and vegan sausages should be banned in the EU, they will likely be banned in the UK as well, for fear of jeopardizing trade deals. Already, after a judicial interpretation of a previous EU ruling, terms such as oat milk, soy butter and vegan cheese are banned on UK labels, but not – because consistency is for suckers – coconut milk or peanut butter.
So what explains the selectivity? Pressure. The European Parliament’s decision is a response to pressure from the meat and dairy industries, which have long sought to eliminate competition. This has no more to do with preventing confusion than a Rocky Mountain oyster has to do with a marine bivalve. It’s a question of protectionism. This is why peanut butter and coconut milk are still legal: they rarely compete directly with animal products.
These anticompetitive practices have a long history. In the 19th century, the American dairy industry first succeeded in having margarine declared a harmful drug and then restricted its sale under the Oleomargarine Act of 1886. It is reassuring to know that legislators made as good use of their time then as they do today.
The livestock lobby is extremely powerful. Its campaigns are bolstered by right-wing influencers, who are waging war against a wide variety of plant-based products (vegetable oil, soy, almonds, avocados, any plant-based meat substitute), often for completely spurious health or environmental reasons, while conveniently ignoring the much greater impacts of animal products on the human body and the living planet.
The food industry knows that words are a powerful weapon. If Moses had promised the Israelites a land of mammary secretions and insect vomit, I doubt many would have followed him to Canaan, although these were accurate descriptions of milk and honey. She knows that if plant-based foods have to be marketed under foreign and alienating names, it will reduce their market share.
The livestock lobby seeks to normalize and naturalize the cruel, grotesque, and planet-destroying realities of its industry, while labeling plant-based foods as unnatural and evil. As usual, he made mincemeat for European legislators. Although I should point out that I don’t mean that literally.
