Do you think names like "vegan sausage" are confusing?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Re. horchata, this won’t be the case for the US and other markets where horchata isn’t a traditional summer treat, but I’ve met people who were feeling conned after trying a vegetable milk and not finding the taste and texture milk-like at all - when I pointed out they’re much more similar to horchata (taste, texture, mode of preparation and nutritional value), they were fine with that.

But I have the hypothesis that vegetable-milk companies would rather bundle their products with animal-milk in public perception than differentiate them.

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Off topic Nava - I spent a week in Spain back at the end of September - four days in the Valencia region and three days in Murcia - Horchata de chufa was one of the things I specifically sought to try for the first time - and I enjoyed it (although I think I should have ordered a cafe cortado or something with it, to offset the sweetness.

New culinary experiences are always an exciting part of any travel for me. I came away feeling like I need to go back and spend a whole year there, just to work my way through all the foods, drinks and culinary traditions that are completely new to me.
Even the humble ones are interesting, just because they’re different.

63

I’m not so sure about your ideas, but as a confirmed omnivore I agree I don’t much give a damn.

As a linguistic purist I give a lot more of a damn about marketers debasing the language in pursuit of sales.

I actually like names like “tofurkey”. It makes it clear that A) it’s veg-based, and B) it isn’t turkey but it’s intended to be an analog to turkey. Strictly speaking, “vegan turkey” or “soy turkey” or “TVP turkey” are all non sequiturs. As is a hell of a lot of other marketing speak, e.g. “cable modem”. But that doesn’t mean we ought to encourage it; if I was King, marketers muddling the language would be a hanging offense. After a *very *short trial.

Ref Bo’s comment about vegan fake-chicken, fake-turkey, fake-beef, fake-pork, and fake-shrimp tasting & having mouth-feel like their non-fake models. The clear point is that it is legit to name these things in reference to the meat product they’re designed to resemble.

My vote would be to label them as mock-whatever. Mock-turtle has a long pedigree that we should extend here.

It’s not vegan sausage. If it’s ordinary TVP it’s mock-sausage, or if the product is hard core and trying to emphasize formal vegan-ness versus mere vegetarian-ness then it’s “vegan mock-whatever”. Or “vegan organic mock-whatever”. Or the great grand-daddy of dietary orthodoxy, “paleo vegan organic mock-whatever”. Not snarky; serious. Vegan, paleo, and organic are restrictive adjectives. They don’t define what it is, they define what it isn’t.

So now we need the rest of the name to say what it is; and that is abolutely *not *turkey or chicken or whatever. But, ref **Bo **again, it *is *valuable to define it in terms of what it’s aimed at duplicating. Mock-whatever does it for me. And ref me above I’d hang any marketer that left the “mock-” off the name.

This is a lot of it. Many people are dragged into vegetarianism/veganism for various external reasons and they want familiar sounding names for the analogs to their familiar products. They want to be able to make their well-known recipes with simple drop-in ingredient changes.

The marketers want the smallest possible obstacle between doubtful try-ers and new adopters.

64

I don’t think that’s all they want - they also want a name that doesn’t appear to denigrate the product.

The ‘Mock’ prefix, however traditional, isn’t going to seem like a favourable label to some branding designers, because ‘mock’ sometimes implies ‘inferior’ - and regardless how technically true it is, there is (and should be IMO) no obligation for product manufacturers to make brand names factually descriptive.

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“Horchata” might work for the soy/almond/rice “milk” issue, although it requires that English steal yet another foreign word.

As I said, the term “almond milk” has been used in English for hundreds of years, it’s not a new term coined by marketeers. Once cow’s milk became relatively safe to store for more than five minutes (as well as other improvements in maintaining dairy herds and extracting bovine milk) “milk” became less a term for “white, opaque liquid” and more specifically “extracted from mammary glands”.

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Do you think names like “vegan sausage” are confusing?

Not confusing, but it is highly offensive to people who are familiar with Vegan Sausage as a sexual position.

67

Well, there’s that and “horchata” already has a meaning in US English (at least among certain regions) that specifically refers to the cinnamon-and-sugar flavored rice water drink from Mexico (that ultimately derives from the Spanish drink.) Around here, it’s even become a bit of a trendy word for the cinnamon, sugar flavor (and I suppose rice, but I generally don’t taste any rice with the “horchata” flavored things), like we have horchata ice cream and Blue Moon even has horchata beer. I suppose we can always re-educated consumers, but if I came across “soy horchata” in the current context here on a supermarket shelf, I would expect (and I assume most consumers would) something like a sweetish, cinnamon flavored soy milk, not plain soy milk.

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People are using soy, almond, rice and other non-dairy milks in the same contexts as people use cows milk - to pour over cereal, to whiten coffee, to make milkshakes, and so on - it makes perfect sense to continue calling them ‘milk’, and the only people confused or offended by this are those who choose to be confused or offended.

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Would you care to enlighten the rest of us? :slight_smile:

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I divided a can in half one time. The universe ended.

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Really? Because until I read the term in this thread I don’t ever recall hearing the word “horchata” before. I have no doubt that there are some parts of the greater Chicago area where the word is spoken regularly, but that’s because we have Spanish-speaking neighborhoods.

I find a certain segment of the population vastly overestimates the penetration of Spanish into American English overall. Certain regions there’s quite a bit, but it’s far from universal.

Anyhow, maybe “horchata” isn’t a good choice after all, for the reason you mention, but there’s a lot of Americans who have no idea what the word means.

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Link is to a scene from the TV show community. :slight_smile: enjoy

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Hence my “at least among certain regions” qualification. I’m sure the majority of Americans don’t know what it is. But frickin’ Blue Moon has an horchata flavor, so it’s not completely esoteric. (But, no doubt, I assume it’s mostly in Chicago and LA markets, and the such. It’s also fucking terrible.)

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Oh, now that I think of it, there’s also that Rum Chata stuff that is around everywhere, at least around here.

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Not as confusing as “chicken-fried steak”.