\n<\/p>\n
M<\/span>ost of what you eat is sausages. I mean, if we\u2019re going to get literal about it. Sausage derives from the Latin salsicus<\/em>, which means \u201cseasoned with salt\u201d. You might think of a sausage as a simple thing, but on this reading it is everything and nothing, a Borgesian meta-concept that retreats as you approach it.<\/p>\n From another perspective, a sausage is an offal-filled intestine, or the macerated parts of an electrocuted or asphyxiated pig or other animal \u2013 generally parts that you wouldn\u2019t knowingly eat \u2013 mixed with other ingredients that, in isolation, you might consider inedible. For some reason, it is seldom marketed as such.<\/p>\n But to the legislators of the EU, a sausage can now have only one meaning: a cylindrical object containing meat. Never mind that cylindrical objects containing no meat have been marketed under names such as \u201cGlamorgan sausage\u201d (selsig Morgannwg<\/em>) for at least 150 years. Never mind that even Germans once felt the need to call animal sausages mettwurst<\/em>, to distinguish them from other kinds. Never mind that almost everyone knows what \u201cveggie sausage\u201d, \u201cvegan sausage\u201d or \u201cplant-based sausage\u201d mean. A recent survey of 20,000 Dutch people found that 96% are not confused by such terms, which is probably a higher percentage than those who can readily distinguish left from right. The consumer must at all costs be protected from an imaginary threat.<\/p>\n For the same reason, members of the European parliament decided, burgers must also contain meat. It happens that no one is sure why a burger is called a burger. They were once called \u201cHamburg steaks\u201d, but no clear link to Hamburg has been established. <\/strong>Nevertheless, before the term was abbreviated, meat patties were widely known as hamburgers, whose literal meaning is an inhabitant of Hamburg. If \u201cveggie burgers\u201d are misleadingly marketed, so is any burger not made from the minced inhabitants of a north German city.<\/p>\n Last week, the European Council and European Commission tried and failed to make sense of all this. They were unable to agree a common position with the European parliament, and bumped the decision to January, when a new council presidency will have to deal with it. I can\u2019t blame them. You cannot make sense of a senseless policy.<\/p>\n The parliament\u2019s food literalism is remarkably selective. Given the time of year, perhaps I should point out that there is no meat in mincemeat, which is used to fill mince pies. Many years ago there was, but the meat component fell out of fashion. Minced meat, by contrast, is<\/em> meat \u2013 I\u2019m sure that\u2019s not confusing. Similarly, sweetbreads are meat, but sweetmeats are not. None of these terms appear to cause any problems for legislators, though they have insisted that the only permissible definition of meat is \u201cedible parts of the animals referred to in points 1.2 to 1.8 of Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 853\/2004\u201d, which is, let\u2019s face it, how it\u2019s commonly understood by shoppers across the EU.<\/p>\n If a vegetarian hotdog is to be ruled out, as the parliamentarians demand, on the grounds that it contains no meat, the meat version should be ruled out on the grounds that it contains no dog (hothorse should in some cases be permissible). They might also be shocked to discover that there is no beef in beef tomatoes, butterfly in butterfly cakes, cottage in cottage pie, baby in jelly babies or finger (mostly) in chocolate fingers. And don\u2019t get me started on buffalo wings.<\/p>\n All this must be deeply confusing to shoppers. Like Wednesday Addams, who, when offered girl scout cookies, asked whether they contain real girl scouts, we puzzle every day over what such names really mean. Human beings are entirely incapable of pattern recognition, derived and secondary meanings, metaphor or conceptualisation. Language never evolves, and nor does food. This is why, when confronted with \u201cpigs in blankets\u201d, \u201ctoad in the hole\u201d or \u201cspotted dick\u201d, people curl up on the floor, banging their heads and moaning weakly (OK, there might be other reasons). Everything can have only one meaning, and this meaning must be what legislators say it is.<\/p>\n If you are thinking \u201cbenefit of Brexit\u201d, I\u2019m sorry to disabuse you. If the European Council and Commission eventually decide that terms such as veggie burgers and vegan sausages are to be banned in the EU, they are likely to be banned in the UK as well, for fear of jeopardising trade agreements. Already, after a court interpretation of a previous European decision, terms such as oat milk, soy butter and vegan cheese are prohibited on UK labels, but not \u2013 because consistency is for suckers \u2013 coconut milk or peanut butter.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018From another perspective, a sausage is an offal-filled intestine.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Westend61\/Getty Images<\/p>\n So what explains the selectivity? Lobbying. The decision in the European parliament is a response to pressure from the meat and dairy industries, which have long been seeking to stamp out competition. It has no more to do with preventing confusion than a Rocky Mountain oyster has to do with a marine bivalve. It\u2019s about protectionism. This is why peanut butter and coconut milk are still legal: they seldom compete directly with animal products.<\/p>\n These anti-competitive practices have a long history. In the 19th century, the US dairy industry managed first to get margarine declared a \u201charmful drug\u201d, then had its sale restricted under the 1886 Oleomargarine Act. It\u2019s reassuring to know that legislators made just as good use of their time then as they do now.<\/p>\n The livestock lobby is immensely powerful. Its campaigns are reinforced by rightwing influencers, who wage war against a wide variety of plant products (vegetable oil, soya, almonds, avocados, any plant-based meat substitute), often on entirely spurious health or environmental grounds, while conveniently ignoring the far greater impacts of animal products on human bodies and the living planet.<\/p>\n The food industry knows that words are a powerful weapon. If Moses had promised the Israelites a land of mammary secretions and insect vomit, I doubt many would have followed him to Canaan, though these are accurate descriptions of milk and honey. It knows that if plant-based foods have to be marketed under alien and alienating names, this will depress their market share.<\/p>\n The livestock lobby seeks to normalise and naturalise the cruel, grotesque, planet-wrecking realities of its industry, while casting plant-based foods as unnatural and wrong. As usual, it has made minced meat of European legislators. Though I should point out that I don\u2019t mean that literally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of what you eat is sausages. I mean, if we\u2019re going to get literal about it. Sausage derives from the Latin salsicus, which means \u201cseasoned with salt\u201d. You might think of a sausage as a simple thing, but on this reading it is everything and nothing, a Borgesian meta-concept that retreats as you approach<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[1072,11726,10759,5354,21054],"class_list":{"0":"post-38440","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-george","9":"tag-lobby","10":"tag-meat","11":"tag-monbiot","12":"tag-sausage"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}