[mc32]

I agree with this.

Make up your own new word for the new product. Tufu isn't "bean cheese".

People don't need "to be fooled" in order to get them to try highly processed plant products. Truth in advertising and all that.

If you're selling processed plants or insects, great, market it and label it as such. If it's yummy, people will lap it up.

[igetspam]

This is stupid. Meat is not solely used to describe the output of slaughter. I'll even help you out:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/meat

We've used "meat" to describe lots of things that we eat for a very long time. This is purely bending the knee to a lobby and hyper regulation of enterprise. It makes sense since that's a core value of republican... wait a second! What's happening? What about free enterprise and not having to do things that go against your personal values in business, like serving The Gays or paying for birth control????

Nobody is fooled. It's called "Beyond Beef," not "Beef." This regulation would make it illegal to label something as "Not Chicken" because lobbyist convinced the state that Texans are too stupid and illiterate to recognize anything but the word "Chicken." Frankly, this law is f'ing insulting. I live in Texas and I know how to read.

Full disclosure: I'm not vegan or even vegetarian.

[drewrv]

> Meat is not solely the used to describe the output of slaughter.

Reminds me of this bit from an underrated sitcom I binged a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN4V_tgXuNY

I'm surprised the lawmakers didn't try to regulate "tuna steaks" out of existence.

[astura]

Watch out, once someone starts successfully selling prepackaged cauliflower steaks then they'll come to take "steak" away too.

[dzhiurgis]

The biggest advertising lie from all these companies was "it's so good that you can't tell it apart, vegetarians even sick from it". If you ever tried it, it's not Beyond Beef, it's more of Near Rubbish.

[voisin]

Can you recognize that some people hold different opinions from you? You feel that way - great. But clearly not everyone does, and labelling the product as what it’s historical analogue is allows people to have a sense of what they are getting. Did the designer try to mimic beef, or chicken, or pork, or what? It’s handy for the newly curious.

[dzhiurgis]

Unsure what's the personal attack for, but to answer the second part of your comment - should we also allow labelling quinoa as pork imitation? I mean it has the protein...

It's handy to know when you are in substitutes section and seeing what is what. Hijacking SKU is fraud.

[tablespoon]

> We've used "meat" to describe lots of things that we eat for a very long time.

That's not a very good argument. Those other uses are only valid in very specific contexts. If someone ordered "extra meat" for their sandwich, and the restaurant threw in some apple slices (as in meat = "the edible part of anything, as a fruit or nut"), pretty much everyone would find that to be scammy.

> Nobody is fooled. It's called "Beyond Beef," not "Beef."

Yet. This fake "beef" is currently a trendy novelty product. If/when it becomes cheaper than real beef, I guarantee you that there will be concerted attempts to trick people into buying it.

These kinds of naming standards are necessary. For instance the difference between "frozen dairy dessert" and "ice cream" (which as a specific government enforced definition). They're both marketed like ice cream, but if I see the former label, I know not to buy it because it's cost-reduced crap (e.g. they whipped so much air into it it can't be called ice cream anymore).

[igetspam]

> If someone ordered "extra meat" for their sandwich, and the restaurant threw in some apple slices

I guess that depends, is it an apple sandwich or a chicken sandwich? Context clues come into play. If I ordered a Beyond Beef sandwich and asked for extra meat, do you think I'd be asking for pork?

> is currently a trendy novelty product.

Your bias is showing. Nobody looking at the actual market would agree. Major players in factory farming are getting into the act. They not only don't see it as a novelty but also they see how good the margins are.

> when it becomes cheaper than real beef, I guarantee you that there will be concerted attempts to trick people into buying it.

Why would there need to be an effort to trick people and why would it be the non animal products doing the tricking? When it becomes cheaper then animal based meats, wouldn't it be the ranching industry that would benefit from market manipulation?

> I know not to buy it because it's cost-reduced crap

Cool. Biased and loudly subjective. Double points.

I get it. You've put some part of your personal identity politics on making sure people know what you eat. Your arguments are broken though. This is the type of rhetoric that stems from a fragile ego. I'm not saying your ego is fragile but it's whipped so full of air that it can't be called confident any more. (See what I did there?)

[arblomp]

> The bill will also keep companies that produce food from...cell cultures, not slaughtered animals, from using the label “meat,”

Do we need to make up a new word for “chunks of bovine muscle tissue” if it wasn’t cut out of a whole-ish cow?

Sounds to me like it’s about entrenched farming interests throwing red tape at a perceived threat, not “truth in advertising”. No plant burger or vegan cheeze on the market is nefariously hiding their true identity. They actively market their non-meat-ness, to appeal to their main demographic of meat-avoiders, in big green letters on their packaging. There’s no confusion between their earthy/futurey brand names, versus the old-fashioned-farmer style branding of their slaughtered-animal (their words!) counterparts.

[Digory]

I think it makes sense to standardize some word for the difference, especially since you’re talking about a commodity.

I imagine cheap meat is going to be qualitatively different than cheap Meetabix or whatever they will call it for some years. “It came from a cow” will impose some kind of minimum quality standard — and it’s not clear that standard will always be met in a non standardized market of bovine cell growers.

And the inputs are different. Should an increase in cow meat futures drive up grain prices or plastic clamshell prices?

[igetspam]

What's the quality standard you're protecting? Suffering? Slaughter? Loss of animal life?

[jschwartzi]

I guess Texas has finally figured out what Coleco already knew back in the 80's. Warm Dead Bird is a much more accurate name than fried chicken.

[mc32]

I agree with you on the muscle tissue grown in a lab, if it's more or less the same as bovine tissue from an ex-animal, I think it's fair to call it beef.

New synthetic materials though should find their own nouns to use and not coöpt terms with longstanding meanings.

[bg4]

Beef like product? Worked for cheese wiz.

[fmakunbound]

Except that’s not how language evolves. Good luck with that though.

[ub99]

Right… the primary motivation of Texas lawmakers is that they are concerned about people being fooled… I want to be able to buy non-dairy yogurt and non-dairy mayo. Not “yellow paste” or “white soft creamy desert”. There is nothing wrong with products adapting to new realities and offering alternatives under the same general name. These products are clearly labeled already. The only reason to introduce this legislation is to protect powerful animal product lobbies.

[mc32]

Nothing wrong with calling it plant protein.

Mayonnaise is just a dressing like thousand island, Russian, ranch and hundreds of others who acquired their own names.

Yogurt I'm mildly ok with since basically it just means coagulated milk and also includes the necessary bacteria.

[quantified]

Call it “Houstonnaise”, that’ll show ‘em.

[ub99]

I find this discussion fascinating. We are both consumers discussing consumer rights. I - a consumer - want to be able to buy a product I recognize by name, that is also made from specific ingredients that I choose, e.g. almond milk. I don’t need your protection from being “fooled”. You - a consumer - don’t own the ingredients that must be contained in a specific product.

[dariusj18]

Let's let the market decide!

[dragonwriter]

> I want to be able to buy non-dairy yogurt

no such thing exists.

Velveeta can't even be called “cheese spread” despite having more similarity to any reasonable definition of that term than any non-dairy simulant has to yogurt. If people want to sell and buy plant-based yogurt-style products, that’s fine, but sellers of sich goods shouldn’t expect to be allowed to call them “yogurt”.

[ub99]

I am holding in my hands right now a container that is labeled Cashewmilk Yogurt (produced by Forager). It’s a great tasting non dairy yogurt. Highly recommend!

[plntbsd]

Ok we’ll call it yogurt-like. Happy?

[david38]

Thick tires have a lot of “meat”.

Meat does not just mean the muscle fiber of an animal.

I wonder how opposed Texas was to what people call “American cheese”, now just called “American” because of the FDA.

What about negations? Is it now illegal to call something “fake meat”?

What about “I can’t believe it’s not butter”? Is that legal in Texas?

The lengths to which Texas politicians will go to protect their masters is crazy.

[hoppyhoppy2]

Are "soy milk" and "almond milk" and "oat milk" off-limits, too? Since none of them are actually female mammal secretions, what should we call them instead ?

[stjohnswarts]

We should also cancel coconut milk even though it's been an expression for hundreds of years. It's only right.

[astura]

I guess milk of magnesia has to go with it too then.

[hoppyhoppy2]

We might also need to rename the Milky Way galaxy. (Or is it acceptable because it's only milk-Y?)

[underseacables]

Soy, almond, and oat, artificially thickened beverage.

[Ekaros]

They should be as should butter too. Terms like fat, oil or margarine could be used as well with those.

[hoppyhoppy2]

You're saying we should rename the popular nut spread (the one that pairs well with jelly) to something like "peanut margarine"?

[Ekaros]

Yes. Or "peanut spread", "peanut smooth", "peanut stuff". There are dozens of more honest options.

[ub99]

By this standard words can have only a single meaning. If they have more than one meaning it’s dishonest.

[mikewhy]

The literal meaning of tofu is "bean curd".

[mc32]

But that's not what the English ear hears... and on the other hand, in Chinese Tofu is the reference whereas in English Cheese is the reference object.

Moreover, Chinese word creation clobs disconnected words together to make new words. Fire + chicken = Turkey, Fire + Car = Locomotive/Train, Fly + Machine = Aircraft, etc. So this is not out of the ordinary for Chinese word creation.

[yongjik]

Not sure how curd is called in Chinese, but I think the literal meaning is closer to "rotten beans".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%85%90 - to rot; to decay; to spoil

[trompetenaccoun]

Curd doesn't traditionally exist in (Han) China, as with most other dairy. There's a word for it now (凝乳) but it's not in any relation to tofu.

The "fu" in doufu taken by itself does indeed mean rotten. But characters on their own can have very different meanings compared to when used in combination in words. There isn't necessarily a connection, just like in English the word "rotten" doesn't have anything to do with the number 10 that's contained in it.

Tofu isn't fermented but made by boiling soy milk and adding a coagulating agent. I was curious and looked it up and that process was described the same way already in Ming Dynasty, so the "rotten" character might just be random and not have any such meaning. It's very common in Chinese that new concepts are expressed with existing characters, because you can't go around making up a new character for everything, no one could ever remember that many characters (bad enough as it is). Often it's just about the sound. For example the characters in the word for cheese (起司) mean "rise" and "manage" when taken on their own. It would be gibberish to read it that way, but every Chinese person knows combined they mean cheese.

[elliottkember]

Curd is not cheese

[mikewhy]

TBH I still don't get why cheese is being referenced, I've never heard that comparison.

I brought it up because the GP said "tofu is not bean cheese" when that's almost exactly what tofu means.

[jfengel]

Cheese is being referenced because it's a natural extension of "You can't call it X if it's not the way we used to do X". If Texas wants to limit the definition of meat, then logically they should be limiting the definition of cheese, milk, and even salt, for that matter.

Without that, it looks less like a matter of evenhanded regulatory enforcement or consumer protection, and more like a legislature beholden to a corporation.