Mississippi makes it a jailable offense to call plant-based or cultured-meat patties "burgers"

Abolish Mississippi.

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Don’t worry, once the large farming corporations figure out how to corner the market they’ll be champions of free speech.

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"The statute reserves these appelations for foodstuffs derived from “slaughtered livestock.”; Soylent burgers are made of people!

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When will these tiny red states realize that government intervention isn’t the only thing they need to worry about. For example; us giant prosperous blue states don’t have to do business with them and the farther off the rails they go the less attractive business partners they become.

Don’t worry Mississippi and others we will solve our problems and yours too at no charge to you at all because that’s what we do. It’s what we have to do.

Also, their logic isn’t actual horse shit, so we may need to come up with a more neutral term for that kind of thinking.

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Friends of Tom know it’s actually pronounced “handburger” (you know, because you eat it with your hands): http://fotpediadotgeocities.com/index.php/Handburger

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And there’s absolutely nothing about the form-factor of hamburgers or hot dogs that necessarily links them to meat, either. They are, by design, pulverized and reconstituted into a form factor completely alien to the source material. Patties and links don’t just fall out of the side of the animal when you cut them open. Those terms describe a form factor, not contents. (That said, I don’t think “vegetarian Buffalo wings” is misleading, either. Just that someone would have slightly more of a semantic leg to stand on griping about that than griping about tofu dogs and veggie burgers).

The fact that they never pitched a fit about turkey burgers/sausage/bacon, despite it doing the EXACT SAME THING (taking a food commonly associated with one protein source, and creating it from an alternative protein source) makes it abundantly clear that this is not about consumer protection, and is entirely about knee-jerk right-wing dog-whistle politicking and persecution of a marginal/minority dietary group they see as threatening to their omnivore orthodoxy.

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So, as a private citizen and while in Mississippi, can I also be jailed for calling a veggie patty between two pieces of bread a ‘veggie burger’; even if I’m not selling it?

Can I just sit on the steps of a state courthouse and loudly talk about how delicious my veggie burger is? Will the speech police be called instantly?

edit for late nigth typos

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I think there would be poetic justice in the term hamberder catching on for meatless patties.

Yep. Call em’ hawt dawgs and be done with it.

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Feels Like Coming Home, The South’s Warmest Welcome, The Magnolia State

The first two are misleading.

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There is already a company selling pressed nut milk as “Malk”.

The problem here, ultimately, is that Mississippi if a smaller state and it may not be economically feasible for companies to product state-specific packaging; if so, they will either have to use this naming universally for their products, or stop selling them in Mississippi.

This is not unlike the strategy used by California to get auto manufacturers to improve their emissions – meet our standards, even if you have to do it universally to make a profit, or you don’t get to sell cars here – but to the benefit of a small number of large entrenched corporations, at the expense of consumers (instead of the other way around.)

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Other misleading terms that leave consumers sobbing in confusion:

Peanut butter, egg plant, coconut milk, onion skin, nut meat

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I read a headline the other day that said if Virginia were going to split, separating the deeply blue, DC surrounding northern districts from the predominantly red rest of the state, that new red state would be the poorest in the union.

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They have.

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As someone who deals with print items, including labeling and package printing, you’re talking at most a few pennies per item due to a lower print run, or the actual same cost because there is a point where it levels out.

Logistics wise there might be a small uptick in cost in making sure a specific batch goes to Mississippi, but pretty sure if your logistics team is any good, that isn’t a problem either.


You know, I thought corporations were people? And peoples have the rights to free speech. Which means I bet this will be challenged.

So on one hand, you probably will win that fight. On the other, you’ve strengthened corporate rights.

Guess we will see.

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Anything they like.

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Agreed, this is about soybois. It’s literally meme-based politics.

Replace blue states with “America” and Mississippi with “Mexico” and this could be a Trump sound-bite. Contemptuous of losers who don’t know their place. You are not better because of where you live. You are the reason poor non-urban people buy in to absurd legislation like this.

Good point, I’d say it’s exactly because they’re so poor and disempowered that they’re doing meme politics rather than “real, serious politics”. There’s an unspoken understanding that no politician or new program can fix the crushing poverty, disease and suffering that pervades daily life. No matter what anyone claims, the money just isn’t there. In such a hopeless condition, what can local politicians meaningfully offer their constituents? Memes.

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The sneaky thing to do here would be to amend the proposal so that burgers and hot dogs have to be high quality, filler-free meat that excludes pink slime and other mechanically recovered proteins. Let’s see how keen the agri brigade are for this law then.

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The “almond milk” thing is even more ridiculous. White, plant-based fluids have been called “milk” for over 800 years, so that terminology literally pre-dates Modern English. English speakers haven’t been using the word “beef” as long, and I can’t imagine the fuss if someone decided you legally had to come up with another name for cow meat.

If it were a modern product, that might make sense. But it dates back to the Middle Ages. When it was called “milk.”

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