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Why?
I want something vegan that looks and tastes like sausage. I want to have an easy time finding such a product in the store. I look for a product that says "I'm basically a sausage, but vegan". I buy a vegan sausage.
What's the problem with that?
How would they even define a sausage anyway, meat content? Well now blood sausage is not a sausage too despite being almost entirely animal product - probably more than most sausages actually given how much filler they put in them.
Or shall we rename all the cheap sausages in shops to "emulsified high fat offal tubes" to more accurately describe them?
And blood sausage is a very good example to show that "sausage" is an established appendix to show the shape of something, while specifying what it's made of with a term beforehand. Pork sausage. Beef sausage. Turkey sausage. Blood sausage. This works so well that I can invent words of artificial things and still convey what I mean by that: Paper sausage. Ice sausage. Cloth sausage. Glass sausage. ...Chickpea sausage. Broccoli sausage. Bean sausage.
It's a non-brainer. The legislators are being deliberately obtuse here.
Also traditionally it would've been in an intestine, but they've been making other sorts of casings for meat-based sausages for a while anyway, so that argument against plant based sausages is dead in the water too IMO
Nah, this would hurt meat lobbyist' feelings.
The EU document specifically mentions that blood based products counts as meat, so blood sausage is fine.
That's fucking stupid. Blood isn't meat, it's blood. How can something liquid be meat?
In the end it's a legal document and the terms are defined for the purpose of the regulation, not necessarily how the terms are used in daily life.
Hot take, I don't think legal documents should get a pass to redefine words and use them differently than how they're used in daily life. I'm sure they do it on purpose specifically to make it harder for laymen to parse those types of documents, which is stupid.
It would be easier and clearer to write this regulatory document using common parlance, and then we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
Where do you live that blood sausage has more animal product than regular sausages (where the filler is often bone mass and such)? Blood sausage filler where I come from is usually barley groats (or some other format of barley. Barley is really universal apparently).
Picked out a random one they sell here. Contents: barley groats, "food blood" (19%), pork rind, pork (8%), roasted onion, pork fat, salt, various spices
These are generally listed in rough order of importance, so blood sausage is basically more barley groats than animal products.
Now for comparison, the cheapest smoked sausage out there (the sandwich sausage variety, not grill or oven). Contents: chicken meat mass (39%), pork (18%), pork fat, water, cheese (6%), various shit you don't even want to think or know about.
It's utterly cheap shit (the chicken meat mass of course includes shit like soft-ish bones ground up, etc), but even this is more animal-y than blood sausages.
I am all for allowing vegan sausages to just be called sausage. But I am not the biggest fan of vegan steaks getring the same treatment. Mostly just because a steak is by definition a slice of meat. Patties are fine since they are just ground minced stuff made into a certain shape kinda like sausages.
Don't really care about steaks, but burgers, sausages and many others are really established with their veggie and vegan variants. It's completely nonsensical to ban them.
I mean you can just call the burgers "patties" which we do in my country anyway. Burger refers to the whole sandwich, not the patty. If they regulate the word "patty" to require meat, I hope farmers will drop cow patties at their doorsteps.
Not a fan of them doing it to the word sausage though, it's clearly a form factor above all else.
But a restaurant should be allowed to sell me a veggie burger. Why on earth should we call it a burger for beef patties, chicken patties, veal patties and fish patties, but not for bean patties, veggie patties or plant based meat patties like impossible? The only thing different to a "burger" are ingredients which are already swapped out for different ones on a regular basis.
Tbh chicken, fish, pork should also not count as burger if they want to actually preserve purity.
Personally I think the burger should refer to the shape of the sandwich, regardless of what you put inside it, and we should call the patty a patty, regardless of what it's made of. This luckily is what we're doing where I live, but if that means that restaurant-prepared veggie burger can't be called a veggie burger, that's bullshit. I thought it meant specifically the patties (which in American are called burgers and if anyone has authority on naming here it's the Americans, as they've perfected the art of fa(s)t foods).
What I'm interested in is - how is this supposed to work with all the different languages in all EU countries? For example in finnish "steak" and "patty" both translate as "pihvi". On top of that words like "kasvispihvi" (vegetable steak/patty) have been in use since early 1900s. Why the hell should EU be able to affect our language to a degree of banning commonly used words everyone understands? Absolutely nobody would think kasvispihvi contains meat, and it's absurd to even suggest that it couldn't be used in marketing
I never said they should regulate it. I just said that I don't see the concept of steak (even in my language/not english) as anything other than meat. When I go grocery shopping I look at what I buy but I also expect the packaging to say what kind of steak it is. Like beef, chicken, pork. Even vegan ones like soy steak, bean steak (I don't actually know any examples).
My main point being call it what you like I just don't agree with the semantics of calling a non meat product steak since at least in my language (Slovene) and english steaks are defined by being a cut of meat.
My point was just that there's so many languages in EU, and there's bound to be other words that won't really translate 1:1 like my pihvi example. Can something be sold as "bean steak" is a completely different discussion than can it be sold as "papupihvi", yet they're supposed to be treated the same with this regulation? It's such a mess