Plant-based or "meat analogue products" are under fire by South Africa's Dept of Agriculture, recently announcing it was going to ban the use of meaty language on the packaging of foods that don't contain meat.
The question then is what food names are automatically associated with meat?
The use of Pie is clearly exempt since "pie" is the pastry casing within which a filling is stuffed. So labelling a pie as a meat pie or veg pie is totally acceptable.
The same does not apply to other names. As an example "vegetarian sausage" will no longer be legitimate sausage once the new reg's are passed.
The RSA Meat board refer the OED definition of a sausage as an "article of food consisting of chopped or minced meat seasoned and stuffed into the cleaned gut of an ox, sheep, or pig and tied at regular intervals".
So what are they going to call sausage made from meat free casings and stuffed with vegetable innards?
A cylinder of protein shaped like what was once called a sausage but cannot in this case be called a sausage because it contains no meat ( quite a mouthful)
This brings to the fore ComfortablyNumb posted a picture of plant based burger patties (I think that's what they were).
To call any round thing that does not contain meat a "burger" would be confusing to us, the consumer.
A suggested alternative for the non meat fillings shaped into round's to be grilled on a BBQ or BBC and then inserted into bread rolls is "a disk".
Would you like a hamburger or a veggie disk?
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