You call that a burger? A food fight over names

New York

IN CASE you haven't heard, they're making meat out of plants. Burgers out of soy and coconut. Fried chicken out of jackfruit. Steaks out of "cooked wheat gluten". Brands such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have expanded into fast food, infiltrating chains like Burger King and Dunkin' with meatless patties and breakfast sausage.

Meat people - that's animal meat people, meaning ranchers and farmers and their lobbyists - say the competition is welcome. But, in 24 states this year, they have worked to pass legislation to make it illegal for plant-based food to be called meat. The measures' supporters do not want vegan or vegetarian food products to be called burgers, steaks or dogs.

Now, the alternative meat-makers are fighting back. Last week, a group of plaintiffs that includes Tofurky filed a lawsuit in Arkansas. They argue that the state's law violates the First and 14th Amendments and condescends to consumers who understand what is meant when "burger" is modified by the word "veggie". Tofurky and Upton's Naturals have also filed suits in Missouri and Mississippi, with the support of advocacy organisations the Good Food Institute and the Plant Based Foods Association. The ACLU and the Institute for Justice are also involved.

"There's just limited words in the English language to convey a concept that the consumer already understands," said Michele Simon, the executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association. "If you want to convey something tastes like bacon, what do you do? Do you say it's salty and fatty and, wink wink, pig-like? The point is that we should not have to engage in linguistic gymnastics."

Miyoko Schinner has been selling a cheese-like product made of cashews since 2014. The state of California prohibited her from calling it "vegan cheese". She resigned herself to calling it "cultured nut product", and for four years, cultured nut product it was. "It was sort of a vegan secret," she said. "If you were part of the vegan cult then you knew that the 'cultured nut product' meant cheese."

Then, at the dawn of 2018, Ms Schinner decided she couldn't be a cultured-nut-product-monger any longer. She started labelling her wares as vegan cheese. It was, she said, "absolutely" an act of civil disobedience.

Producers like Ms Schinner say that it's important for them to use words people recognise on their packaging. It helps them appeal to new customers and can convince vendors to sell the products next to those they resemble. In the early 2000s, alternative milks were placed near their cow-derived counterparts, and sales began to grow. (According to data commissioned by the Good Food Institute and Plant Based Foods Association, alternative milks make up 13 per cent of the fluid milk market.) "That move completely changed the category," said Caroline Bushnell, an associate director at the Good Food Institute.

This has been upsetting to dairy farmers, who were already struggling before the alternative milk industry explosion. Although trade is perhaps more to blame for dairy farmers' struggles, alternative milks have become an industry bugbear.

The US meat industry is far more stable. But its producers have taken notice of the milkman's troubles. Andy Berry, the executive vice-president of the Mississippi Cattlemen's Association, said that his members "looked at where dairy was 20 years ago and there's a consensus that no one wants to end up where dairy is with these alternative products". (At the moment, plant-based meat is roughly one per cent of the market.)

But vegans and vegetarians insisted that the word "meat" does not refer solely to the flesh of dead animals. The first definition of the word in Webster's New World College Dictionary is "food, especially solid food as distinguished from drink", although it calls that usage archaic.

"It is meat, it's just nut meat," said Monica Stoutenborough, the owner of PuraVegan Cafe & Yoga, in St Louis. Her cafe makes a sprouted seed-and-nut sausage. "It's not flesh meat. But it's nut meat!" she said.

Freya Dinshah, the president of the American Vegan Society, agreed. "We've had nut meats for decades, if not centuries," she said. "We've had coconut milk since probably the beginning of time and if they want to be explicit they can say cow milk and we can say soy milk. The dairy industry thinks they've got the corner on milk." Ultimately, these semantic squabbles are about marketing. They're not being fought by consumers.

"This is basically a fight between two industry sectors," said Ms Simon of the Plant Based Foods Association. "We didn't pick the fight. Meanwhile, what is the consumer doing? They're happily enjoying their meat and dairy alternatives." NYTIMES