Would a burger by any other name taste as meaty? American ranchers and the politicians who represent them are betting that it wouldn’t—and moving to restrict the language that can be used to describe new foodstuffs.
Last month, Reps. Anthony Brindisi (a New York Democrat) and Roger Marshall (a Kansas Republican) introduced a bill that would legally restrict the use of the words “meat” and “beef” to products derived from farmed and slaughtered animals. It would also brand any pretender—whether made from soy or grown in a petri dish—an “imitation.” Several similar laws have already been passed by state legislatures, including in Missouri and Arkansas, and such measures have been proposed in more than 20 others. Meanwhile, countersuits spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and the veteran alternative-meat company Tofurky argue that such measures infringe on free speech.
“ We shouldn’t ban the use of the term ‘meat’ for new food products. ”
It is easy to make fun of these semantic squabbles, but the dispute here is about more than language; it is about adapting to 21st-century change. We shouldn’t ban the use of the term “meat” for new food products any more than we should bar Americans from using “milk” to refer to soy beverages. The better solution is to modify the noun.
The U.S. has no legal definition of “meat” because it never needed one. References to “meat,” “meat products” and types of meat such as beef are marbled throughout federal laws and regulations, all written under the assumption that meat can come only from animals. But modern food-production technology challenges all that.
Companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods make plant-based burgers out of soy and peas that taste and look virtually indistinguishable from beef patties. Cellular agriculture (meat grown directly from animal cells) complicates things further by producing a genetic analog for conventional meat—one that just happens to bypass unpleasant stops at the factory farm and the slaughterhouse.
Technological advances have a habit of disrupting not only production processes but also language, pushing and pulling at long-established definitions of everyday items. And they are often fiercely opposed by entrenched interests.
American dairy producers, for instance, fought margarine tooth and nail, pushing for bans, heavy taxes and restrictions on its ingredients. Unethical margarine merchants did sometimes try to pass their animal-fat-derived product off as butter, forcing Washington to enforce labeling through the Oleomargarine Act of 1886 (which a congressional website says “defined the very essence of butter”). Congress, however, acted not because of consumer outcry but because of lobbying by the National Dairy Association: Margarine was cheap and threatened dairy producers’ bottom lines.
Something similar helps explain the sudden rush to legal action from animal farmers now. They coexisted with the Tofurkies of the world for decades, but early meat alternatives weren’t much of a threat. The target market for tofu, tempeh, seitan and veggie burgers was vegans, vegetarians and hippies. Tofurky had the decorum to say what it was: a self-ridiculing impostor happy even to have a spot at the Thanksgiving table.
The claims made by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are far brasher. They call themselves meat, they sell burgers at Burger King and sliders at White Castle, and they jostle for space in the meat aisle at the supermarket. They also can appeal to many consumers with their far smaller ecological hoofprint: “Compared to meat from animals, Impossible Burger production uses 96% less land, 87% less water, and produces 89% fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” says Impossible Foods.
The meat lobby argues that all this lacks transparency and fairness. “A growing number of fake meat products are clearly trying to mislead consumers about what they’re trying to get them to buy,” warns Jennifer Houston, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. This echoes the arguments for Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s ambitiously named DAIRY PRIDE Act of 2017 (the acronym stands—really—for “Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, milk and cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday”), which is designed to prevent products made from soy, oats and other plants being advertised as “milk.”
The Real MEAT Act proposed by Reps. Brindisi and Marshall (in which MEAT stands for Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully) seems aimed at something more than clear labeling. The bill seeks to fix the legal definition of “meat” and legally define plant-based and lab-grown products as imitations.
But that isn’t the way labels are normally used. Most food labels refer either to the product itself (its physical or nutritional properties or, more controversially, whether it is genetically modified or organic) or to its process of production (for instance, whether or not it is “fair trade”).
The industry-driven claim that “meat” has only one proper meaning—the flesh of a slaughtered animal—may be true of contemporary usage. But historically, “meat”—from the Old English “mete,” or sustenance—has referred to food more generally. It came only slowly to mean animal flesh, and even then carries exceptions such as coconut meat.
“ Consumers who buy meat want a particular flavor and eating experience, not necessarily a dead animal. ”
Moreover, consumers who buy meat want a particular flavor and eating experience, not necessarily a dead animal. There is a reason we call it “meat” (a foodstuff) and not “carcass.” Consumers buying an Impossible Burger know what they are getting, just as consumers of soy milk surely know they aren’t buying a dairy product; and the consumers of the future who will order lab-grown burgers will actually be ordering animal meat, albeit produced differently. “The meat industry attempting to define meat as something that comes from a slaughtered animal is every bit as absurd as trying to say that your phone is not a phone because it does not plug into a wall anymore,” Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit group that promotes meat alternatives, recently told the Economist.
The suggested term “imitation” to describe plant-based meats is particularly troubling. Under Food and Drug Administration guidelines, “imitation” applies to any product that “resembles another food but is nutritionally inferior,” such as the imitation crab used in some sushi. But Impossible, Beyond and cellular burgers are virtual nutritional equivalents of beef burgers. Calling them “imitations” is prejudicial, casting new products as inferior without informing consumers about their properties or methods of production.
Besides, makers of nonconventional meats have already addressed this problem. Companies such as Beyond Meat already use the prefix “plant-based.” The entrepreneurs behind lab-grown meat have tried several prefixes in recent years, including “cultured,” “clean” and “cell-based.” The current choice being tossed around is “cultivated,” which is the most linguistically correct: It refers to the biological process of replicating cells in a growth medium.
Instead of trying to limit the term “meat,” it would be vastly fairer to require federal labeling with prefixes that describe the new foodstuffs and their modes of production, giving consumers information without foreclosing a level playing field between the old meat and the new. After all, the words we use are the products of habits, markets and technologies. New meat products pull us back toward the more inclusive, older use of the word. And consumers should be free to decide what they eat—and what they call it—without meddling from special interests.
—Dr. Dutkiewicz is a postdoctoral fellow in political science at Johns Hopkins University whose research focuses on the politics of food production.
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