Veggie has meant "lacks meat" for a long time now as well. When I buy a "veggie" Jamaican patty or a "veggie" burger, I fully expect it to be made using black beans or TVP, or other plant matter that isnt necessarily literally a vegetable. A reasonable consumer should be able to distinguish when veggie indicates vegetarian and when veggie indicates vegetable, unless there is a clear grammatical ambiguity I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be the case.
Edit: yeah, all the products listed very clearly go this route. This is as crazy as when food manufacturers tried to claim that vegan alternatives of mayo and dairy milk were being misleading by using the term mayo or milk when they are very clearly labeled. Seems frivolous to me.
Nah, that's gonna confuse the hell out of a lot of people. It's only something you'd know if you were already buying the meat-flavored stuff. People who weren't already are only gonna see that there's another food packaging word they can no longer trust to mean what they think it does.
What harm is done by people who would not purchase vegetarian seeing packaging and thinking it's literally a vegetable burger instead of a vegetarian burger? What is the likelihood that someone completely unaware that "veggie X" is in common parlance would purchase a veggie burger based on this confusion? I don't think a person who is a "reasonable consumer" in any meaningful sense would be put in the position of making an erroneous purchase based on this, so I don't see why literally every vegetarian product would need to change to accommodate them.
This is a legal case, the question they have to decide is whether consumers are being misled to the point of making erroneous purchases, and potentially have suffered personal or financial harm. The question isn't about whether in some abstract sense this harms the public's trust in food labeling.
Veggie has meant "lacks meat" for a long time now as well. When I buy a "veggie" Jamaican patty or a "veggie" burger, I fully expect it to be made using black beans or TVP, or other plant matter that isnt necessarily literally a vegetable. A reasonable consumer should be able to distinguish when veggie indicates vegetarian and when veggie indicates vegetable, unless there is a clear grammatical ambiguity I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be the case.
Edit: yeah, all the products listed very clearly go this route. This is as crazy as when food manufacturers tried to claim that vegan alternatives of mayo and dairy milk were being misleading by using the term mayo or milk when they are very clearly labeled. Seems frivolous to me.
Nah, that's gonna confuse the hell out of a lot of people. It's only something you'd know if you were already buying the meat-flavored stuff. People who weren't already are only gonna see that there's another food packaging word they can no longer trust to mean what they think it does.
What harm is done by people who would not purchase vegetarian seeing packaging and thinking it's literally a vegetable burger instead of a vegetarian burger? What is the likelihood that someone completely unaware that "veggie X" is in common parlance would purchase a veggie burger based on this confusion? I don't think a person who is a "reasonable consumer" in any meaningful sense would be put in the position of making an erroneous purchase based on this, so I don't see why literally every vegetarian product would need to change to accommodate them.
This is a legal case, the question they have to decide is whether consumers are being misled to the point of making erroneous purchases, and potentially have suffered personal or financial harm. The question isn't about whether in some abstract sense this harms the public's trust in food labeling.