Fake Meat Can No Longer Be Called Meat, but French Fries Once Counted as a Vegetable — What's Behind the Food Industry's Identity Crises?

New foods catering to the health trend keep appearing, and behind every naming dispute lies a clear commercial motive.

Fake meat is going through an identity crisis.

On March 4, the Mississippi House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 2922 by a unanimous 117-0 vote, requiring an amendment to Mississippi's meat inspection law, in force since 1968, so that foods made from plant protein or insect protein, along with lab-grown meat products, can no longer use the word "meat" to sell themselves.

Barring anything unusual, the state's governor will sign the new bill into law soon. By July 1, the word "meat" will have to come off the packaging of every meat product sold in Mississippi that does not come from raising livestock.

"This won't stop people from buying [fake meat] products — it just makes sure consumers know exactly what's in them." Bill Pigott, chairman of the Mississippi House agriculture committee and himself a farmer, said the bill calls for "truth in labeling."

A similar law took effect in Missouri six months earlier. Lawmakers in at least 15 US states have now introduced bills to stop these startups from calling their products "meat."

The most aggressive proposal comes from Washington State, which would make selling lab-grown fake meat a crime and ban the use of government money for such research, because some lawmakers believe there isn't enough evidence that the research is safe.

Regulators started arguing about this at the national level long ago too. In October 2018, the FDA and the USDA held a meeting to coordinate their two systems. In a joint statement, the two agencies said the FDA would oversee everything that happens to the cells in the lab, while the USDA would hold primary control, supervising production and labeling.

The argument over whether fake meat should be called meat started in 2016. As the fake-meat industry has grown, the argument has turned into legislation.

Fake meat comes in two main kinds: plant-based meat made from plant protein, and cultured meat grown from cells. The second is physically no different from real meat, but it is still stuck in the lab and hasn't solved its cost problem.

The price of plant-based meat, though, has already come down a lot. Take the flagship product of Beyond Meat, the largest fake-meat company: a burger patty made from pea protein, yeast extract and coconut oil, which sells for $11.98 a pound (450g) — pricier than a traditional patty, but already a little cheaper than many organic, grass-fed beef patties.

Beyond Meat sold $32.6 million worth of fake meat in 2017. Judging by the photographs at the front of the IPO prospectus it filed last November, this is a company that sells "meat" — the finished burgers and meatballs in the pictures look no different from the real thing. In a restaurant, at least, your first glance wouldn't tell you they were made from plants.

In 2017, Beyond Meat's patties went on sale in the meat section of the supermarket chain Safeway, then in two other big US chains, Kroger and Albertsons. Ethan Brown, Beyond Meat's CEO, called putting his product on the same shelf as other meat a turning point: "This is a hugely important thing for reshaping how we think about meat. We think it's wrong that animals have to be used to make meat."

Beyond Meat, founded in 2009, has plenty of famous names on its investor list: Bill Gates, Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and former McDonald's CEO Don Thompson. General Mills' venture arm 301 and Tyson, America's largest meat producer, are investors too.

More than 70% of the people who eat the Beyond Burger aren't vegetarians. They are ordinary consumers who simply want to eat more plant-based food.

On fake meat, the livestock industry does not want to repeat the dairy industry's mistakes.

Plant-based milk had its own identity crisis once, and it won

In the EU, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that drinks made from plants can no longer use dairy names, and that even "cheese" or "cream" is a problem when the "milk" in it doesn't come from an animal. But the ruling made exceptions for coconut milk, almond milk and peanut butter, which can keep the names they have.

The steady growth of the market for plant protein and plant-based milk has alarmed the US dairy industry too.

Since late 2016, US dairy has been lobbying the FDA, under the Dairy Pride Act, to stop plant-based drinks from being called dairy products — the same demand as their European counterparts'. Several US lawmakers have also introduced bills requiring plant-milk companies to drop the word "milk" from their product names.

The FDA is indeed reconsidering the question. But lawsuits demanding that almond milk be renamed had already failed to win court support years before.

In 2013, Judge Samuel Conti of the federal district court in San Francisco threw out a class action whose plaintiffs claimed that almond milk, coconut milk and soy milk products were mislabeled because they aren't products of cows. Dismissing the suit, the judge said the claim "stretches the bounds of credulity."

In 2015, Judge Vince Chhabria of a federal district court in California threw out another suit like it, saying one word didn't matter that much: "A reasonable consumer would not think that different products have identical nutritional content; a consumer who cares about nutrition will check the ingredient label."

Plant-based milk has since become the food industry's way of embracing the new health trend head-on. As more competitors pile in, companies are responding by buying rivals, taking stakes in them, and launching plant milks in new flavors or with an emphasis on nutrition.

In 2016, Starbucks announced that to meet customer demand it would start serving coffee drinks made with almond milk. In 2017, Elmhurst Dairy, New York's largest dairy company, closed its plant outside Queens and renamed itself Elmhurst Nutmilk, switching from cow's milk to nut milks made from almonds, hazelnuts and cashews. Whole Foods' private label 365 Everyday Value added organic almond milk, soy milk and coconut milk. In China, Coca-Cola bought the grain-drink brand Zhonglü Culiangwang, and it has also invested in AdeS, the best-selling soy milk in Latin America.

General Mills invested in the almond-milk brand Kite Hill in 2018, putting in $56 million across two rounds. Before that, General Mills had twice invested in the plant-based meat company Beyond Meat.

Meanwhile, french fries and frozen pizza counted as vegetables for a long time

You can argue about whether fake meat's packaging may say "meat." But nobody thinks french fries or frozen pizza are fresh vegetables.

For a long time, the US Congress and the USDA did.

In 2004, the USDA quietly amended a federal rule to classify frozen french fries as fresh vegetables. That followed decades of lobbying by the frozen food industry, which pushed for a change to the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act.

Put simply, the amendment treated cutting potatoes into strips, coating them in batter, frying them and then freezing them as the same kind of operation as waxing a cucumber's skin or sweetening strawberries.

By 2011, whether tomato paste counted as a vegetable was being argued over in the US for months. What was really at stake was this: can pizza count as a vegetable?

A proposal in the US Congress counted pizza as a vegetable in the guidelines for school lunches. That mattered because it decided whether the ketchup served with fries, or the tomato paste on a pizza crust, could be counted as a vegetable in the lunches served in American elementary and middle schools.

The issue made headlines across US media in 2011 and drew protests from the USDA and from food campaigners. What set off the fight was the tomato paste on pizza. The argument at the time was that because tomato paste contains potassium, fiber and vitamins, two teaspoons of it on a pizza made the pizza a vegetable.

According to USDA figures, only 20% of schools actually prepared student meals by the lunch guidelines Congress published. Even so, counting tomato paste as a vegetable was itself the result of lobbying by frozen food companies, salt producers and others.

It took Trump to end all of this. In May 2017, the Trump administration decided to change school meal standards and give schools more flexibility. Schools no longer had to work out whether fries and pizza were vegetables. They could just serve them.

Behind every fight over a food's name is a clear commercial motive, and the earliest one goes back to a tomato in 1893

Arguments about what food is called have never been linguists or botanists splitting hairs. Industry has driven every one of them.

Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? The BBC once put the question to several botanists, and their answer was that botany has no word for "vegetable" at all. "Vegetable" is purely a cooking term, and even in cooking, defining a vegetable depends on defining a fruit. A fruit is any structure a plant grows that contains, or is supposed to contain, seeds; a vegetable is any plant food that is neither a fruit nor a seed.

In 1893, the question reached the US Supreme Court. US tariff law at the time taxed imported vegetables but not imported fruit. New York customs ruled that tomatoes were vegetables and that importers owed duties; importers such as John Nix argued that tomatoes were fruit and shouldn't be taxed.

The importers sued the New York customs collector for a refund of the duties they had paid. In the end the judge ruled, based on how people ate tomatoes, that tomatoes were vegetables. In the century since, the Supreme Court has cited the decision three more times.

When no money is involved, whether a tomato is a vegetable or a fruit doesn't matter. When every ton of tomatoes carries an extra tax bill, a definition of "vegetable" that doesn't even exist in botany suddenly matters a great deal.

It is the livestock industry that doesn't want fake meat called meat, and the money at stake is far larger than it was for tomato imports a century ago.

World meat production has grown fast over the past fifty years; compared with the 1960s, the world now eats four or five times as much meat. The International Food Policy Research Institute's recent 2018 Global Food Policy Report predicts that, setting the effects of climate change aside entirely, global meat consumption will grow 66% by 2050.

USDA data from January 2018 said that in 2018 Americans would eat 222 pounds of red meat and poultry per person for the first time — the equivalent of 800 burgers a year each, or 2.4 burgers a day.

But the growing worry that meat isn't healthy enough, and the popularity of plant-based diets, have begun to threaten the traditional livestock business.

With the health trend running, food companies are looking for options outside animal farming. Tyson, the US food giant, essentially owns the American chicken business: farmers buy equipment and chicks from Tyson, raise the chicks, then sell the grown birds back to Tyson, which processes them into the chicken nuggets in supermarkets.

Yet Tyson and another food giant, General Mills, are both Beyond Meat investors. Food companies are investing in plant-based dairy in the same way.

Different companies play different parts in different naming fights.

On the question of what counts as a vegetable, the food companies are the ones doing the aggressive lobbying: classifying french fries and pizza as "fresh vegetables" meant schools could spend government purchasing subsidies on fries and pizza instead of on relatively expensive vegetables.

In 1946, the US Congress passed the National School Lunch Act, which required the government to draw up a nutrition plan for students each year and to provide lunches in elementary and middle schools and community preschools. In 1969, Congress amended the act to provide free lunches to poor students. In 2011, tomato paste was classified as a vegetable, and food companies profited directly.

The lunch guidelines, written to reduce childhood obesity, lost their point.

Afterwards, the overhaul of school lunch nutrition guidelines that Michelle Obama pushed still failed to keep fries and pizza off school lunch trays. Congress also blocked a USDA rule that would have limited fries to twice a week, a change it made at the request of potato growers and the food companies that make school-lunch pizza.

What's behind sweetness is changing too, for consumers who want health and taste at once

Sweetness is changing.

Food companies once spent a great deal of effort protecting sugar's standing. As early as the 1960s, the sugar industry paid scientists to play down the link between sugar and heart disease.

More than fifty years of research on nutrition and heart disease, including many of today's dietary recommendations, may have been shaped in large part by the sugar industry. The study that showed this ran in JAMA Internal Medicine.

A 2015 article in The New York Times reported that Coca-Cola had given researchers millions of dollars to weaken the link between sugary drinks and obesity.

As what people know about health and nutrition changed, the food industry began replacing added sugar with sweeteners such as sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol and acesulfame potassium, providing sweetness while cutting sugar intake.

Julian Cooper, a professor at the Institute of Food Science and Technology, argues that the direct side effect of sugar substitutes is that people eat more snacks, because they believe these sweetened foods do less damage to their health.

Something similar happened with fat once before. Artificial trans fat, or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, was cheap, easy to work with and extended the shelf life of all kinds of food, and it was once treated as a creative invention of the food industry. From 1950 on, it was held up as a healthy substitute for the saturated fat in butter and lard.

Then researchers found that trans fat was linked to sudden heart attacks and strokes, and that it also raised the risk of type 2 diabetes and even of infertility in women.

Even without a health crisis on the scale of trans fat's, sugar substitutes have gone through their own rounds of iteration and upgrade.

Food companies tried aspartame, more than 180 times as sweet as sucrose and very low in calories. Aspartame's safety is disputed, and next to sugar it still tastes different.

Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola again) once offered a $1 million prize for a safe, low-calorie natural sweetener. Both 7Up and Kraft Heinz have launched products using stevia, a more natural sweetener.

To keep up, some traditional sugar companies are moving into stevia. Producers of healthy sweeteners are expanding hard to meet the growing demand of big customers like Nestlé, Mondelez and Danone.

Stevia used to be a nobody in the market. As the health trend swept the world, it has even become a selling point food companies use to promote new products.

If it's healthy, drink more of it. That is the logic underneath all of this.

The naming problem isn't confined to artificial products, and of course it isn't confined to the US

The argument over freshwater "salmon" made quite a stir.

A CCTV report said that a third of the "salmon" on the Chinese market comes from reservoir fish farms on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which set off a controversy. The crux of it: this farmed domestic "salmon" is really freshwater rainbow trout, and is it safe to eat raw?

The China Fisheries Association explained on its website that "salmon," as the word is commonly used in China, has always included trout. It said domestically farmed rainbow trout is held to strict standards for water quality, feed and isolation, so it can be eaten raw even though it is a freshwater fish. Finally the association stressed that salmon farming is an industry the state encourages, called on those "maliciously smearing" it to stop spreading rumors, and asked the public to trust information from authoritative institutions.

Several so-called "authoritative institutions" then stepped forward to vouch for rainbow trout. Rainbow trout is popular with Chinese fish farms because it looks so much like Atlantic salmon — both have orange-red flesh — and costs far less.

Salmon and trout both belong to the family Salmonidae, but to different genera: the salmon genus and the trout genus. The first is what most people picture as the "salmon" served as sashimi, mostly Atlantic salmon imported from Norway, Chile and Scotland, originally native to Europe. Freshwater rainbow trout mostly spend their whole lives in fresh water; only some subspecies move between fresh and salt water with the seasons.

As the number of Chinese people with disposable income has grown, salmon — a seafood that is nutritious and not too expensive — has been eaten in larger quantities year after year. Calling rainbow trout freshwater "salmon," or selling it without even the word "freshwater," became good business.

Seafood isn't the only category where one thing has passed for another. Meat is another.

The steak people buy, for instance, is often scraps of beef glued together and then sliced, and one of the glues is fibrin extracted from pig's blood.

A worse additive is "pink slime": the fat, skin and cartilage left over from beef processing, run through a series of processes into "finely textured lean beef." In 2001 pink slime was approved as an additive for beef products, with no requirement to name it on the packaging.

So consumers, without knowing it, could buy beef products containing up to 15% pink slime. Pink slime went into many products on supermarket shelves and was widely used by schools and fast-food chains.

Only when a 2012 ABC News series exposed it did ordinary consumers begin to learn the truth about their meat.

The objections were mainly that pink slime couldn't be called "real beef," and that the ammonia residue left by the process used to make it was a health risk.

After the story broke, the USDA and the FDA both maintained that pink slime was safe and legal, but distributors including McDonald's, Burger King and Walmart announced they would stop using beef products that contained it.

There is a blunter example: in 2013, countries across Western Europe discovered that the beef in supermarket and fast-food beef products wasn't entirely beef — horse meat had been mixed in.

To give consumers cheap, healthy and tasty all at once, even traditional foods are no longer quite what they stood for

In the fake-meat fight, The Good Food Institute, an advocacy group on the industry's side, wrote to the USDA: "The way beef is produced has already changed enormously compared with our grandparents' generation. If the USDA restricted the words 'meat' and 'beef' to beef raised and slaughtered by traditional methods, almost nothing on the market today would deserve the label."

It is true that livestock and poultry farming have changed beyond recognition, from country farms into highly industrialized factories. Take chicken: in 1957, a chicken weighed about 0.9 kg 56 days after it hatched. By 2005 the figure was 4.2 kg. And it was eating less feed than before.

The meat sold today is itself already the product of industrial farming and industrial processing. That is the main reason billions of people can eat meat regularly now, and the reason the health arguments never stop.

At the same time, more radically new foods are being born. Take cultured meat, still expensive: stem cells grown into edible chicken in an artificial environment, so that eventually people could eat chicken breast, steak, even polar bear, without raising or killing an animal.

The product is still in the lab, still at the stage of squeezing costs down. Once meat is separated from the living body, it needs expensive fetal bovine serum to grow. Substitutes are still being researched.

Supporters of cultured meat say it can feed the world and protect the environment at the same time, using far less water and land than cattle, with carbon dioxide emissions only a few percent of theirs. It also avoids plant-based meat's texture problem, since it is made of the same cells as meat from a raised and slaughtered animal. But it has changed the form in which life exists. Is that a humane way of protecting animals, or a denial of the animal as a whole living creature?

The argument will not slow the research. In May 2018, the food giant Tyson invested $2.2 million in the Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies, with a plan to cut the cost of cultured meat from $10,000 a kilogram to $5-10 by 2020.

When Tyson announced it was entering cultured meat, it said: "We've begun rethinking what Tyson is. Now we think of ourselves more as a protein company — you know, there's demand and growth now in other forms of protein."

The earth is only so big, and there are no fewer people on it. The food industry will not slow down its remaking of the foods we know, and every company caught up in these fights over names is part of that remaking. So is the fast-growing chicken that never sees sunlight in its life, the plant product engineered to taste like meat, the low-calorie sweetened cola, and the comfort of squeezing ketchup onto fries and telling yourself you've had a vegetable today.

Cheap, healthy, and still not willing to give up taste — what else did you expect?

Cover image from Beyond Meat