In food label fight, Europeans debate how sausage gets made

Buying a veggie burger or a cauliflower steak in Europe may soon be a thing of the past, after lawmakers in the European Parliament voted Wednesday to restrict the use of terms like "burger" or "steak" to food made with meat.

- MELISSA EDDY

Trays of plant-based sausages on a trolley at Symplicity Foods in London.

(BLOOMBERG)

The vote reflects a push by Europe's powerful agricultural lobby, which for years has pressed officials to crack down on what they say is the misuse of terms associated with cuts of meat. Other branches of the European Union's government, the council and the commission, need to weigh in before the proposal becomes law in the 27-nation bloc.

The proposal states that names such as burger and steak, along with sausage, hamburger, escalope, egg yolks and egg whites, must be used "exclusively for products containing meat," defined as "the edible parts of the animals."

Debate over the proposal has been heated.

"People can eat tofu or test-tube patties all they want, but it's not meat," said Céline Imart, a member of the European Parliament who represents a largely agricultural district in France, who proposed the move. She insisted that allowing nonmeat alternatives to share terms with animal-based products could mislead consumers. "Words have meaning," she said. "A steak is meat. Period."

Proponents of alternatives to meat have argued that using such well-known terms is sensible, and that consumers are savvy enough to identify the protein that went into the products they bought.