You say ‘veggie sausages’, I say ‘Quorn tubes’. Let’s call the whole thing off!

For over a year now, hungry snackers have been tucking into Britain’s (second) favourite sausage roll. With 96 layers of crumbling puff pastry, Greggs’ vegan sausage roll has stirred up a media firestorm. With help from odious adversaries like Piers Morgan, plant-based meat substitutes have caught the gaze of the public eye. So far, it hasn’t blinked.

Much of this surge in meat alternatives is a result of an explosion in consumer awareness about the environment. Britons are increasingly mindful that livestock production degrades the planet. The evidence wholeheartedly agrees.

Inevitably, the methane-belching meat industry feels threatened by the unfamiliar competition. And, as always when bloated political institutions can pontificate limitless regulations, cronyism ensues.

Among the most pernicious examples of this are the regulatory squabbles over whether the substitutes should be allowed to don the labels of steak, sausage, escalope, burger or hamburger. Proponents argue that these labels cause customer “confusion”. This semantic policing has already engulfed France and is creeping into the EU and the United States too.

What should replace the “confusing” labels? “Veggie discs”, ”Quorn tubes”, ”soya slices” and “seitan slabs” are at the top of the EU’s list. One might reasonably ask why, if the EU’s decision was uninfluenced by nervous meat companies, the suggested labels sound so unappealing. The EU has nothing to hide in this regard. In one decision regarding plant-based milks” (Verband Sozialer Wettbewerb eV v. TofuTown.com GmbH), the EU created new regulations built to inhibit “competing substitute products”.

Of course, courts in the EU and U.S. provided no evidence of any customer confusion. “In all of these battles”, writes law professor Steph Tai, “what we see is a fight not for consumer certainty over particular terms, but for access to certain commonly understood places in our diets”. Humans have used non-literal analogies to describe food for as long as we’ve been eating it. “[i]n Mandarin, mianjin, or wheat gluten, means literally ‘wheat meat’”, writes Tai. “Similarly, the Bengali word for jackfruit translates as ‘tree mutton.’”

If Britain’s EU negotiations wind up with our supermarket shelves stocked up with “soya slices”, it would be a tremendous shame. In any case, Britain should learn from the EU, U.S. and France that handing unfettered regulatory jurisdiction to the nanny state breeds nothing but illiberal cronyism. By reducing state regulatory power, we thereby take back control from big business, and give it back to the consumers.

Amos Wollen is the winner of the under-18 category in our Young Writer on Liberty 2020 competition.