Great news! In October the European Parliament rejected the meat industry’s attempt to ban the use of words like ‘sausage’ or ‘burger’ to describe plant-based sausages and burgers. But it was a darned close-run thing - just 55% of MEPs voted against insanity. Not really surprising as the EU Parliament has form when it comes to these things.
But before you congratulate them on their common sense: they also voted to ban any reference to dairy products unless they come from cows, sheep, goats or Italian water buffalo. So no soy milk, no almond milk, no sunflower cheese. What is the EU going to do about coconut milk? Or coconut cream? Or peanut butter? Should we just give the EU Parliament control over our dictionaries. These words are part of the English language. No doubt ‘Milk of Magnesia’ is heading for the chop, too.
In 1981 my brother Gregory created the world’s first vegeburger. We got the trademark as the word had not previously appeared in print. So it was Vegeburger™. The problem with that was the word went generic. Hoover had the same problem when ‘hoovering the carpet’ became a verb for sucking out dust. A descriptor may be generic but that won’t stop the valiant guardians of the consumer, sorry, producers in Brussels.
If someone buys coconut milk it’s frightfully confusing for those poor souls who are unaware that coconuts don’t have udders bursting with milk and don’t say ‘moo.’. As for peanut butter, it’s called ‘burro di arachidi’ (peanut butter) in Italian, ‘mantequilla de mani’ (peanut butter) in Spanish, ‘beurre d’arachide’ (peanut butter) in French and ‘Erdnussbutter’ (peanut butter) in German. I think maybe that particular train may have left the station but don’t be surprised if the EU vote initiates a process of suppression of the way people actually speak and starts to rewrite dictionaries.
This Whac-a-Mole game with vegans and vegetarians and coconut milk and peanut butter lovers still has a long way to run.
Meanwhile the EU Green Deal takes shape and the EU Parliament is quite happy to ignore the scandalous waste of food and land it represents. There are 22 million hectares of EU farmland devoted to growing rapeseed for biodiesel. That’s enough land to feed 30 million people a year. 10 million people die of hunger globally every year, but the EU Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation mandates that we feed cars and trucks and aeroplanes, which take priority over starving human beings. And that’s before you count the 2 million hectares of palm oil that ends up as biodiesel or power station fuel in Europe. If we had carbon pricing instead of EU laws that require the burning of food there would be a lot more happy orangutans in Indonesia. It always vexes me that orangutan lovers are more concerned about a tiny amount of non-hydrogenated palm oil in a jar of peanut butter (sorry, ‘peanut-based bread surfacing material’) than they are about the fact that their hybrid car is running on a palm oil/diesel blend.
Then there are those poor French farmers who are still producing relatively ropey wine that nobody particularly cares to drink. Wines from England, New Zealand and other areas are organic and more palatable. Understandably the French wine growers are very pro biofuels. You take the wine, turn it into brandy but instead of leaving it in burnt oak barrels to develop some flavour you just mix it with petrol at 15%. The E85 petrol blend of grape wine ethanol and petrol is subsidised to make it a lot cheaper than regular petrol and that helps the French to quietly burn (with subsidies) all that wine that nobody wants to drink. That wine ethanol also makes good hand sanitiser - coronavirus saves the day!
While the EU continues to squabble about what is a burger or milk or butter or a sausage, Britain is launching the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme. Britain will lead the world in having a farming policy that will deliver ‘public money for public goods.’ So much more grown up than a farm policy that just makes global warming worse while trying to change the language people use to describe their food.
