In the same way as happened with dairy products, it was prohibited to call plant alternatives milk, cheese or yogurt, now it is happening with meat. And France wants to prohibit all products of plant origin from being called meat, or steak, or sausage, or any other name that could confuse the consumer.
Thus, the French government gives in to the pressures of the meat industry and will prohibit, through its Council, a more detailed decree than the current one. The aforementioned entity has prepared a list of twenty-one terms that can lead to confusion or deception for consumers in the meat market. This list of names refers to meat products such as “ham”, “schnitzel” or “steak”. The 21 names that are part of the list cannot be used in the marketing of vegetable protein products. In addition, another list of names has been prepared where the presence of plant products cannot be more than 5% if they want to use names such as sausage, for example.
France wants to avoid confusion in plant products that pretend to be meat
Behind all these actions and new regulations are the French meat lobbies. An industry with large turnover and number of employees that wants to defend its products and gastronomic traditions. Furthermore, they do not want the words like farmers, farm or directly the word “meat” to be used in this type of food products.
On the other hand, defenders of products made with vegetal protein They argue that this will be a brake on their commercialization. These products are necessary to reduce the carbon footprint of the French country and these measures will slow down this process, according to defenders of vegetable protein.
Finally it will be European Union which will rule on this French norm. Obviously the standard does not have any effect on all export products and could conflict with other standards from other European countries and should be clarified in a united market.
