Six years ago, I speculated in this column about what we might call man-made versions of protein, previously known as “meat”. At the time, “shmeat” was a popular word, but in the intervening period it seems plant-based products have become more popular than those experimental substances grown in laboratories, using animal tissue as a basis for their growth.
Though these products might still be more palatable to those who find the slaughter of animals abhorrent, they could still be called “meat” without necessarily falling foul of the proposed new regulations governing plant proteins in SA.
Plant-based products, or “meat analogue products”, that imitate the taste and texture of meat without containing any meat, are under fire. SA’s department of agriculture recently announced it was going to ban the use of meaty language on the packaging of foods that do not contain meat.
The question that arises here is: what food names are automatically associated with meat?
Pies are clearly exempt, since a “pie” merely denotes the pastry casing within which a filling — be it meat, chicken, cheese or vegetable — is stuffed. So labelling a pie as a beef pie, a chicken pie, an unspecified curry pie or a spinach pie, is still entirely acceptable.
The same does not apply to other names, which has become the cause of angry debate.
As an example, “vegetarian sausages” will no longer be legitimate sausages once the new regulations are passed.
If you ask me, and millions of others, a “sausage” is simply a cylindrical food item encased in some sort of covering, containing who knows what.
The SA Meat Board, its allies and the Online Etymology Dictionary beg to differ. A sausage, says the OED, is an “article of food consisting of chopped or minced meat, seasoned and stuffed into the cleaned gut of an ox, sheep, or pig, and tied at regular intervals”.
Language seems, unfortunately, to back up the senseless rules of the anti-veggie-product lobby.
What then, are we to call sausages made from meat-free casings and stuffed with vegetable-derived innards?
A cylinder of protein shaped like what was once called a sausage but cannot in this case be called a sausage because it contains no meat?
Whatever the producers of plant proteins gain on the lesser prices of plants as opposed to meats would surely be nullified by the additional packaging needed to contain so many words.
Another endangered word, when it comes to veggie options, is “burger”. The aforementioned lobby would have it that to call any round edible thing that does not contain meat a “burger” would be to confuse the consumer.
How is it that for decades various gourmet and fast-food restaurants have offered beef, chicken and veggie burgers to millions of customers without, as far as we know, a single complaint?
The suggested alternative for the maligned non-meat fillings shaped into rounds to be grilled on the barbecue and inserted into bread rolls is “a disc”.
If we were to be pedantic, a butternut cutlet would not pass historical linguistic muster, since members of the pumpkin family have no legs.
It is, as solutions go, not a terrible one. “Would you like a hamburger or a veggie disc” might become common parlance about the post-rugby braai. Unlike sausages and cylinders, burgers and discs might be more interchangeable.
There are other ramifications to this proposed rule. A “schnitzel” that is made of anything other than animal flesh might have to become “a flattened, haphazardly-shaped piece of protein made from plant derivatives and rolled in crumbs”.
Likewise a cutlet, which the OED defines in meaning from the year 1706 as “a small piece of meat, especially veal or mutton, cut horizontally from the upper part of the leg”.
If we were to be pedantic, a butternut cutlet would not pass historical linguistic muster, since members of the pumpkin family have no legs, but that does not mean the makers of such products should be strong-armed into spending millions to change their completely understandable “butternut-cutlet” packaging to something that pleases the agricultural cabal.
Schnitzel, on the other hand, merely means “a slice”, so there is no reason on grammatical earth why a schnitzel should not contain peas and broccoli as opposed to pork.
As for the humble burger, it started life in 1838 to describe a deliciously meaty black grape from the Tyrolean area. Later it came to refer to a sandwich containing a beef patty, but if we are really to be true to the roots of language, should we not send this patty of browbeating meat fascists back to the meatpacking district?
