I agree with this.<p>Make up your own new word for the new product. Tufu isn't "bean cheese".<p>People don't need "to be fooled" in order to get them to try highly processed plant products. Truth in advertising and all that.<p>If you're selling processed plants or insects, great, market it and label it as such. If it's yummy, people will lap it up.
Is the premise here that beyond beef et al. are trying to trick customers into thinking they are buying regular beef? A moment's thought reveals that to be utterly absurd. Their business model is entirely dependent on people buying their product specifically because it is plant-based. Seems like old-fashioned protection of a favored industry.
They have a point. Almond milk is not milk, that is a fact, but by including the term “milk” it allows then to get into the dairy section of grocery stores, and piggyback on milk as a product. Same here with plant based food.
This is good legislation getting ahead of the inevitable problems when actually good tasting textured vegetable proteins become cheaper than meat. Once it's cheaper than meat it will be used to replace meat to cut costs in anything at all packaged or processed. The labeling requirements will be needed for consumer protection.<p>It seems like it's a broken legislature being right twice a day kind of thing. They're proposing it for reactionary reasons but it will address a real consumer rights issue in the future.
I have wondered about this. If there is "beyond meat" could there also be "beyond vegan" which is vegan produced enhanced and made better with meat products. Other lines also work, "improved vegan", "vegan like".
Kissing up to the cattle industry. Only an true idiot would think plant based is the same as beef or meat. This is strictly cozying up to beef industry and their lobbyists. This type of thing is an everyday occurrence in Texas.
The bill is <a href="https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/HB00316I.htm" rel="nofollow">https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/HB00316I...</a><p>It's going to be a fun game of whackamole as Beyond Meat starts producing "steak", "fillets", "bacon", etc and other things not explicitly listed in that bill.
I think politicians are generally expecting the industry to come up with a different name. For all the people talking about being "insulted" by these protections, then maybe you'd be insulted by the fact that orange juice, pasteurized milk, ice cream, and yogurt are all things that have general definitions what constitutes them because businesses have deliberately tried to fool the public. It's why you can't just throw 1% orange juice with sugar water and call it orange juice because you threw some pulp in there. Sometimes this is the FDA and sometimes it's a state, as is the case with frozen yogurt and the state of California. [0]<p>Companies like Beyond Meat are producing products that the aspire to taste <i>just like beef</i>. This is one of the first laws I expected to see, because it's standard practice based on precedent.<p>0: <a href="https://www.realcaliforniamilk.com/real-california/frozen-yogurt" rel="nofollow">https://www.realcaliforniamilk.com/real-california/frozen-yo...</a>
I don't think this is a big problem. A beyond meat burger could be marketed as a 'beyond burger'. I don't think people are that silly that they need 'meat' in the name to know it's a meat substitute.
I am enjoying the opportunity to separate the libertarians from the corporatists. "Small government! No regulations! Except for the ones that profit me!"
Ah, of course, Texas is starting the war on cultured meat. The next decade is going to be fascinating: endless legal blocks attempting to slow down the animal product revolution.