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Still the Bavarian meat speciality ‘Leberkäs’ is allowed to keep its name, although it doesn’t contain any cheese (Käse).
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Head cheese doesn’t contain any cheese either. And sweetmeats aren’t meat. But sweetbread is meat, not bread.
And if you go back far enough, Middle English mete just means “food”. Food from an animal’s body parts was flesche. It’s almost like words change meanings, and language doesn’t care what l’Académie Française says.
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Much easier to see in Italian, salsiccia and insalata.
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In this modern world, food, if unregulated, becomes what is salable to a naive public. The traditional words, shaped into new meanings by aggressive advertisers, shall be made to serve the interests of capital and industry,
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In Australia sausages are known as mystery bags - because you never know what’s gonna be in them. Lips and arseholes for sure - and an often quite high fat content - along with sawdust. Possibly not actual sawdust but whatever filler was being used in some of those budget snags sure had the consistency of sawdust. The quality of snags is certainly variable.
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France: you can’t call stuff without meat in it a sausage, even though there have been meat-free things called sausages for over a century.
Also France: Let’s call developing new natural gas power plants green!
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Not really. It’s more centuries of arseholes adulterating their products leading to pretty tight food standards and labelling laws vs. lots of lobbying from all directions.
A lot of that lobbying nowadays is for/against US or other food standards mainly because by European standards, you don’t really appear to have any and your agri-businesses are very aggressive in their desire to sell MOAR STUFF!
Those laws do then lend themselves very nicely to attempts to stifle new products or squash competitors but the alternative is a free for all where say British manufacturers produce a “pork sausage” consisting of 95% bread and 5% “animal matter” which is what the Yes Minister/Prime Minister clip was referencing, or bread that is 30% plaster, etc.
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Keep fucking that chicken, Rosetta!
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I hope so, or my “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas le beurre” brand will never take off.
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Well done, France! We can’t face the risk of people being tricked to consume plant protein instead of animal.
Meanwhile, vegetarians and vegans have to deal with dodgy ingredient lists and evasive replies from customer service from every product, including the ones you wouldn’t imagine that may contain animal ingredients.
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I haven’t been to a French supermarket in a while but in Germany and Norway vegetarian and vegan alternative meat products are often in the same fridge as meat.
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It’s changing in the US, too. My local store used to be like @DonatellaNobody describes: for vegetarian stuff, you had to go to a little niche in the produce section. You could also only find the organic stuff in its own whole section.
I noticed yesterday that the meat substitutes are at one end of the big meat cooler now. And organic stuff is becoming more mixed in with regular stock.
I think those are both good moves. Those of us who search that stuff out will still find it, but now people who wouldn’t search it out will more likely come across it and might think of giving it a try.
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IIRC Alistair MacLean in one of his books has an Australian call sausages “Snorkers” - although this particular slang may have lapsed long since.
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When you consider what goes into meat-based sausage, (“everything but the squeal”), plant-based suddenly has a lot more appeal.
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Snags yes. I’ve never heard the term snorkers uttered. Wiki says it’s Royal Navy slang.
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