One of the biggest debates within the vegan vs non-vegan debate has been the use of language when it comes to food. For whatever reason, meat eaters get very annoyed about vegans naming plant based alternatives the same name as meat products. ‘Sausages’ cannot be sausages if they are vegan, and ‘burgers’ can only refer to meat burgers. There was a whole trend a few years back where a dairy company got annoyed about vegans naming their plant based cheese, ‘cheese’ and so for a brief (very fun) period of time, all vegan cheese was referred to as Gary during any online diagloagues about vegan cheese. It is therefore no surprise that as the vegan movement has continued to grow, the meat industry has been trying to find new ways to stop veganism from being as easily accessible, and this seems to come in the form of trying to legislate what words can be used when describing vegan alternatives to known non-vegan products. We saw it most recently happen with oat milk not being allowed to be called milk, and it seems this is going to be an ongoing battle.
A recent court case in Spain saw a meat company try to claim that labelling vegan chorizo ‘chorizo’ was misleading to consumers, and therefore vegan companies had no right to call its plant based alternatives ‘sausages’ or ‘chorizo’. The arguement made by the meat company claimed that the use of the meat names (chorizo in this case) was msleading consumers as to what the product actually was.
The Spanish courts shut down this claim, ruling that the packaging used clearly stated that the product was a plant based alternative to meat and therefore was not misleading consumers into thinking the product was a meat product. The court also ruled that using familiar and standard culinary terms to describe a plant based product was not unlawful so long as cosumers are not being mislead about what it is they are buying.
Taylor Talks Vegan 