“This ban is a massive win for Texas ranchers, producers, and consumers,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement following the bill’s passage. “Texans have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”
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Texas joins Indiana, Mississippi, Montana and Nebraska in enacting new laws this year; Alabama and Florida did so last year. In March, the Oklahoma House approved a similar bill that did not advance out of the Senate this session.
Eh, I’m not nearly so optimistic. They also got terribly worked up over the word “milk” and labeling plant based burger “burger”.
It’s more about bending over backwards to protect the meat and dairy industry from facing any possible missed revenue opportunity than protecting their actual bottom line, and more importantly about demonstrating their continued utility to the industry.
Kinda like how they’ll work hard to prevent gun regulations that no one is actually proposing because the perception of the possibility of a threat is unacceptable.
I’ll side with them on the milk thing. If I want milk in a product/recipe/dish, I very, very clearly do not want the water infused-flours that they are trying to call milk. I limit dairy as much as possible, but it absolutely does not get replaced in a recipe.
It’s a freak out because they’ve been called milks for an exceptionally long time. “Milk” has never exclusively meant the product of lactation in English. It’s always referred to something white and more opaque than not.
http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/grec31.htm
As another reply mentioned, we specifically have recipes for almond milk from before modern English.
It’s hardly a new thing, just something gaining popularity.
We have specific regulations to prevent consumers from buying the wrong thing within reason. Because most people assume milk means cow milk in the US, that’s what the standard of identity for milk refers to. We don’t need legislation specifically saying that plant milk can’t use the word because you already can’t pickup two jugs labeled “milk” and be unsure if they’re the same thing. Same as goat milk, sheep milk, milk of magnesia, 2% milk, whole milk, skim milk, vitamin D milk, lactose free milk, chocolate milk or strawberry milk.
Hell, “muscle milk” is only technically barely a milk product, absolutely isn’t milk (two milk derived proteins that using prevents a product from being labeled cheese and relegates it to “cheese product”), and would be stupendously unsuitable for cooking. No one complains about it, nor how it contains no muscle at all.
I’d find concerns of consumer protection a lot more credible if they had insisted that other animal milks couldn’t be labeled as such, or at least objected to things like “coconut water”, “rose water”, “cactus water”, “birch water”, “maple water”, “water chestnuts” or “watermelon”. Consumers are evidently only confused by plant milk though, which also prevents them from reading the name of the product. Works fine for other animal milks though, and anything that isn’t milky.
Milky way, milk thistle, milk weed, milk tree, dandelion milk… The list goes on. Oh, and don’t forget cream of wheat or tartar, for when your milky substance is also thick.
The Forme of Cury, a cookbook published in 1390, mentions almond milk. There’s no “trying”, we’ve been referring to non-dairy milk as milk (Middle English: mylke) for at least 650 years.
I’m sorry, but if you don’t alter the recipe to account for your chosen omission… your cooking must be absolute shite. 🥲