It seems as of late that plant-based products that look like meat are all the rage. Everyone from Tim Hortons to A&W is carrying Beyond Meat burgers. Burger King carries Impossible Foods patties. Even Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods is getting into the trend.
Perhaps you haven’t seen it, but since I’m a vegetarian, Facebook has tweaked its algorithm so I see lots of stories about them, and in the comments, I see plenty of meat eaters all saying the same thing:
“Stop calling it meat!”
They’re worried that calling it meat will confuse people. That’s certainly what Mississippi thought, when it passed a law earlier this year banning the use of meat to describe food that didn’t come from a slaughtered animal.
Meat eaters love their meat, and I honestly think they feel threatened by this. I think they might legitimately be afraid someone is going to take away their 12 oz porterhouse or their Sunday chicken dinner.
Except calling plant-based products meat is totally fine. Here’s why.
Meat actually used to be a synonym for food. In fact, it comes from the Old English word mete, which also meant food or meal. Prior to the 14th century, Middle English speakers referred to animal flesh as, well, flesh-meat. Likewise, vegetables were called grene-meat (for another 100 years or so, even).
Funny enough, viande—the French word for meat—saw a similar evolution.
After about 600 years, meat started to take on the narrower meaning that is familiar to us today—around the 14th century—yet its original usage continued for quite some time. For example, the King James Bible uses this meaning, and it was written 2 centuries later:
“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
Genesis 1:29
A more recent example is from 1879:
“As full of fun and frolic as an egg is full of meat.”
Silas Hocking, Her Benny
Or this one from 1954:
“She took her spoon and stirred the melted butter into the yellow meat of the yam.”
Cothburn O’Neal, The Dark Lady
Even today, we still refer to some plant-based foods as meat, such as the meat of a walnut.
So, there’s no problem using meat to refer to plant-based foods. Also, in case no one picked up on it, there are no actual dogs in hot dogs. In case you’re wondering.
