4 ms·

Almond sherbet is the sherbet itself, not the milk drink, but I take the point. And I guess almond milk wasn't the best example to focus on, but I was referring

• wumpus 6y ago
  Cheese and milk products made from allergens (cashews and other nuts) are pretty careful with their labeling, because people die from nut allergies every day. Your hidden-chicken risotto would make me very ill for a day or two. I always ask before ordering risotto, just in case the restaurant is being careless. How is it intentional misnaming to use a term like "Almond Milk", which has been used in English back to the origin of the language? Care to look up how long "rice milk" in Japanese has contained the Japanese word for milk? ミルク and ライスミルク.
• danShumway 6y ago
  Honestly? Yes, if you made a mushroom risotto with chicken, and it was genuinely designed to imitate a mushroom risotto, then that's what I would call it: a mushroom risotto with chicken. What would you call it? Would you come up with an entirely new name? > Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass To be clear, the jerk part here would be serving non-vegan food to a vegan, not the name. If you made a mushroom risotto and slathered butter over it, it would be just as much of a jerk move. This is actually something that comes up a lot with vegan food, it's why we need to read labels. There are multiple artificial meats that are made with milk and eggs and are vegetarian friendly but not vegan friendly. It's rarely safe to assume something is vegan just because vegetables are the primary ingredient or because it's "plant-based". If you want to think of it from another perspective, I would say the same thing is true of allergens. If you made a mushroom risotto and incorporated a peanut sauce or glaze, I don't have an issue with you calling it a mushroom risotto, I don't think anything fundamental has changed about the food. But it would definitely be a jerk move (and potentially negligent homicide) to feed it to someone you knew had a peanut allergy, and you would need to make sure that if you sold it in a store that it showed peanuts prominently in the ingredients. > intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing I don't particularly care about marketing purposes, I don't think the term "almond milk" is any more deceptive than the term "turkey pepperoni" or "black bean brownies". And I do not believe that when the meat industry lobbies to get stuff renamed to "almond juice", they're doing it out of concern for confusion, they just want to create certain connotations in the exact same way that vegan companies want to do. But if you wanted legislation that required food to clearly indicate whether or not it contained animal products, it would make my life a great deal easier, I would be able to stop reading individual ingredients to find out whether or not a loaf of bread was vegan. Right now you can indicate whether a food is vegan/vegetarian, and many products that are marketing to vegans do, especially imitation meats and plant based cheese/milk/butter which I've found to be pretty prominent. But there's no requirement to do so, and many animal products (esp less 'palatable' ingredients like shellac) are allowed to be listed in ingredient lists with no other information at all. I often have to not just read ingredients but look up new terms that I'm unfamiliar with on my phone. Some ingredients don't even have a clear answer, they might be derived from animals or they might not be, and there's no obligation for food manufacturers to indicate which version they're using. An easy way to solve this problem would be for labeling purposes to treat animal by-products and meat more like an allergen, require a line after the ingredients stating "contains ingredients derived from animals".
  • tpoacher 6y ago
    Yes that's what I meant by 'defendable direction'. Feeding 'actual' fried chicken to a person expecting "vegan fried chicken" is a dick move, because they're vegan. But the reverse would probably just be seen as a 'harmless "educational" joke', even though it's still equally dickish. But this perceived defensibility imbalance is partly what creates this confusion-inducing cavalier appropriation of food names. I don't agree with 'turkey pepperoni' and 'blackbean brownies' as being comparable to 'fried chicken (vegan)' or 'ham and cheese toastie (vegan)' (though, ok, they were just examples, perhaps unfortunate, like my almond milk one). The difference is these are primarily recipes, not base ingredients. Obviously, the distinction is not always clear (is cheese an ingredient or a recipe? Is bread? But I would argue in most people's head these are ingredients, not a family of recipes). It's one thing to talk about recipe variants (vegan or otherwise), it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one. I sympathise with the ingredients listing thing though. I'm effectively vegan-eating slightly more than half days of the year, and not having to carefully read through ingredients just to spot the errant 'whey powder' at the end would be very welcome.
    • danShumway 6y ago
      > a 'harmless "educational" joke', Feeding someone food that they don't want to eat is a jerk move regardless of what direction you're going. I do think part of the reason why people take the vegan direction more seriously is that many vegans have strong preferences against eating those foods, and most non-vegans don't. To pull it out of the vegan world and offer a different perspective, this is the same reason why it's more of a jerk move to sneak a Muslim pork than it is to sneak them a black bean brownie. But of course, if you know someone has even a mild preference against eating any food, sneaking them that food is a jerk move. Don't do that, not even for minor preferences. My only disagreement on this front is that I don't see how respecting those people requires forcing general food names to have one-to-one correlations to a specific ingredients list. And I say that as a vegan who does not get offended if a restaurant puts butter on their green beans and still calls them green beans, or if someone calls cricket flour "flour" even though it's not made from grain. I'm not trying to reclaim the word "salad" or anything. All I want is for the restaurant to be able to tell me if something is vegan or not if I ask, or to label it one way or another. And that labeling can be useful for non-vegans as well. > It's one thing to talk about recipe variants [...], it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one. I'm not sure. I somewhat get what you're saying, but I think there are two reasons I'm skeptical about this argument: First, if you have a preference/allergy regarding products like soy and corn, buying meat-based products already isn't safe. The meat industry has been using soy and other ingredients for filler, flavoring, and preservatives for years and their labeling on that front is not particularly great. A good 5-10% of taco bell meat you buy will be additives like thickeners. So the "meat" word isn't protecting people who really want to avoid common vegan ingredients or processed foods. That's a problem that can only be solved with labeling. Secondly, I'm skeptical because over the years the actual legal arguments being made in this debate have taken on an element of absurdity to me, even when dealing with non-recipe foods. As a specific example, the US FDA currently defines "milk" as coming purely from a cow. But that's just ridiculous, nobody would argue that goat milk or breast milk isn't real milk. Nobody would argue that consumer confusion is a good reason to call goat milk something like "lactation" or "juice" instead. And seeing what the industry actually lobbies for, I just don't believe confusion is what the industry cares about. It makes me wonder what's going to happen when lab-meat becomes a thing, and whether the meat industry is still going to have the exact same debates about a food product that is chemically identical to what they're selling. I think sometimes the distinctions between two foods are small enough that they should share the same name even though the distinctions might matter to some (even many) people. The difference between 2% and whole milk matters nutritionally and labeling should reflect that, but they're both still milk. The difference between breast milk and bovine milk definitely matters, and you'd better not give me brownies made with breast milk or I am never visiting your house again and I am telling all the neighbors to avoid you. But they're both still milk. The difference between brie and cheddar cheese is huge, involving both taste and texture -- but they're both still cheese. So we're in a situation where vegan milk/eggs/cheese and animal milk/eggs/cheese are used almost exactly the same way in most recipes, they look the same, they accomplish the same goals in most meals, and while they're distinguishable when eaten, the taste difference between vegan cheddar and regular cheddar is not (imo) as large as the difference between cheddar and, say, cottage cheese. The differences do matter, particularly nutritionally, and they should be clearly labeled, but do they matter so much that they need completely separate words? I would argue that putting them in the same category of food is the least confusing way to talk about them, and nutritional/ingredient labeling is a separate concern from etymology.