MEPs have voted to protect consumers from the grave danger of confusing a bean patty for beef, because apparently, the public can’t be trusted to read a label, says Martin Jonsson.

Here we go again. The industrial meat machine has taken to the fainting couch, clutching its pearls at the thought of someone calling a soy patty a burger. And now, 355 MEPs have joined them on the chaise longue, dabbing their eyes with a pork-flavoured hanky.

Struggling family businesses like Danish Crown, Westfleisch, and LDC Group need help protecting their business from the corporate bean machine. Gone are the days when families would sit down on a Friday to eat a roast chicken – in 2025, we're all chowing down on mycoprotein-based chicken-style fillets. Right?

But big meat isn't driven by their own bottom line in their efforts to push through a ban on vegetarian burgers and sausages. Rather, they are driven by concern for the customer. Calling a vegetarian sausage – sorry, a 100g grillable vegetarian cylinder – a "sausage" is very confusing for us ordinary simpletons.

Yet sausage is a curiously flexible word. Many contain barely any meat, and what meat there is could be chicken, beef, pork, lamb... you name it. So long as there's dead animal in there, it's a sausage. God forbid there's a trace of vegetable in there, though. Unless it's a pork and apple sausage, in which case that's presumably fine.

Similarly, mashing together beans, egg, cheese, and breadcrumbs into a disk shape and calling it a bean "burger" may lead unwitting consumers into thinking they've just put a packet of fine beef into their shopping basket. Honestly, how are they to know, when bean burgers look identical to their beef equivalent?

Admittedly, I am oversimplifying matters slightly here. I suspect the problem isn't so much with bean burgers, but with the multitude of new products that seek to emulate the meat as closely as possible. Some of those certainly look a lot like a meat product, except for the fact that the packaging clearly states that they are vegetarian and that they are usually found in a dedicated vegetarian fridge section. I'm also someone who buys those products, so get your angry comments ready please.

The EP amendment was drafted by French MEP Céline Imart, who also pointed to the importance of strengthening the position of farmers in the supply chain. I'm all for that, and am the first to acknowledge that farmers are important. But one can't help but wonder where Imart thinks vegetables come from.

If farmers are seeing a dwindling interest in meat – and lets go ahead and assume it's not because meat-eaters are so feeble of mind as to not be able to distinguish vegetarian alternatives from their meat equivalent – then that's a market issue. Like every other producer of absolutely anything in this world, they have to adapt what they produce to the demands of the market.

To argue otherwise is to open a Pandora's box of idiotic time wasting (admittedly an area of expertise for some of those involved). If sales of potato crisps (or chips, if you prefer) fall, do we blame that on 'vegetable crisps'? Do we think thinly sliced and deep-fried beetroot is the culprit? Do we slap a fine on beetroot farmers to help humble potato companies like Lays and McCain?  Do we lower taxes on crisps to increase sales and help them tick by in the market?

And if names are the problem, surely there are many others we need to go after. Picture a salad in your mind and tell me what the main constituent part is. Go on, I'll give you a second. It's lettuce, isn't it? Maybe tomato? A spot of cucumber? I think we can agree that vegetables are the star of that show, so let's ban any salad with bacon or chicken in it. Nevermind ham salads, spread upon sandwiches by Germans in their thousands every day. An outrage!

Oh and hang on, there's a tradition in this part of the world of making potatoes out of marzipan. Let's ban that all the way to H-E double hockeysticks.

While we're at it, we should definitely legislate against:

  • Peanut butter and other nut butters. I can't tell you how often I've prepared myself a delicious cheese and tomato sandwich only to bite down and find it inedible, as I accidentally bought non-dairy nut-based butter. Surprise nut butter is truly the devil's work.

  • Coconut milk. Yes, it tends to come in a tin rather than a 1-litre pack, and it's rarely refrigerated. Still, I see the word "milk" and I assume a cow nipple has been involved. Ban.

  • Ice cream sandwich. How many lunches must we ruin? How bad will we allow this diabetes epidemic to get before we ban them? Sandwiches are bread and a filling, not cookie and ice cream.

  • Sweetbreads. you buy a packet of curiously squishy pink goodies, only to bite down and find yourself with a mouthful of raw meat. What the devil! This is neither sweet nor bread, and now you've got food poisoning.

  • Eggplant. I can't tell you how disappointed I was after boiling a couple of these giant, exotic eggs for six minutes and spending the better part of half an hour peeling the shell off, only to find there was not an ounce of egg inside. My soldiers went stale in the process, leaving nothing but chewy disappointment for breakfast.

  • Kidney beans. I'm surprised this wasn't part of the current ban.

Once we're done with the food, let's move to other areas of confusion. Mobile phones are now cameras, which has been devastating for the camera industry. They are also torches, diaries, music players, maps, books, newspapers, and computers. Imagine how many billion-Euro industries could be revived if phones were only allowed to be phones. Won't someone think of the torch makers?