Food fight: why is there a battle over burger labels?

After the European parliament declared ‘vegan burgers’ could be named so, Clare Finney looks at why there is so much debate over how meat and dairy-free products should be described

The EU MEP vote was triggered by disgruntled farmers in France (Beyond Burger)

What’s in a name?” asked the European parliament last week. Would a plant-based burger by any other name seem just as burger-y? The answer, they concluded, was no. 

The proposal, which would have banned the use of terms like “steak”, “sausage” and escalope as well as “burger” on labels for vegan or vegetarian alternatives, was voted down by 379 MEPs (with 284 for the proposal and 27 abstentions) on Friday 23 October –  just in time for the UK’s first permanent vegan butcher, Rudy’s Vegan Butcher, to open its doors in London. Surely Ruth “Rudy” Mumma, who founded the butchers shop with her fiance Matthew Foster, must be relieved?

“To be honest, we didn’t think a huge amount about it. We do want people to have an awareness of what the product is emulating, and the best way to do that is to use the words which are out there already – but Matthew is very creative,” she says simply. “He’d have come up with great names whatever happened.”