Good news from the European Parliament this week if you disagree with the notion of describing plant-based foods using meat labels like “burger” and “steak”. A rare victory for common sense, one might suppose, and certainly a move welcomed by livestock farmers.
MEPs voted on Wednesday to urge the EU Commission to act to prevent vegetarian products being labelled as “burger” “steak” or “sausages” – with 355 votes in favour, 247 against and 30 abstentions.
“A steak, an escalope, or a sausage are products from our livestock farms, period. No laboratory substitutes, no plant-based products,” said French MEP Céline Imart, one of those who led the effort.
In all, the amendment would prevent the use of seven terms: “steak”, “escalope”, “sausage”, “burger”, “hamburger”, “egg yolk”, and “egg white” being used for plant-based products, with EU Parliamentarians arguing it is misleading for the consumer to market plant-based products using meat labels.
Interestingly, EURACTIV reports that Irish MEP Barry Cowen, “failed to secure enough support for a softer alternative that would only ban names “explicitly tied” to animals, such as “beef”, “chicken” and “hamburger”.”
“This will create clarity for both consumers and companies and will remove unintended consequences, like accidentally banning the term ‘tuna steak’,” Cowen said in his amendment, rejecting bans on “format-based” names.
However, a majority of MEPs decided that clarity was best provided by not pretending some awful tofu concoction was a steak, or that mushing together chickpeas and quinoa and something to mask the bland taste could come close to what we think of when we ask for a burger. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz showed his support for the move, declaring “a sausage is a sausage. Sausage is not vegan,” he said recently.
This isn’t the first attempt at clarity, as the EU has already dictated that dairy terms like “cheese” can only be used to refer to products derived from mammary glands, – a decision confirmed by the European Court of Justice. Hence the product sometimes described as oat milk is called an oat drink under EU regulations.
But, it seems strange and more than a little contradictory that in the same week, the European Commission has unveiled a draft strategy pushing transgender ideology – and seeking to allow even children to choose their own gender, a move which would be rooted in a complete denial of biological reality. From The Telegraph:
Children could pick their own gender under new EU proposals.
Member states could be punished for challenging gender ideology under a new strategy unveiled by the European Commission.
Any age limits on gender recognition could be scrapped and therapy to check whether children really want to change their own gender outlawed by the plans.
The European Commission’s new LGBTIQ+ equality strategy 2026-2030 – titled Free To Love, Free To Be – is indeed clear on this ludicrous objective. “The commission will facilitate exchanges of best practices among member states to support the development of legal gender recognition procedures based on self-determination that are free from age restrictions,” the report says.
Children can determine if they are boys or girls or neither, to use the terminology now scattered throughout our schoolbooks. What kind of unscientific, dangerous nonsense is that? But this is not the ramblings of an radical local NGO but the ambition of the most powerful body in the European Union.
The Telegraph also points out that the document “suggests a ban on talking therapy for children suffering from gender issues” and that “this would mean there would be no way for parents or professionals to check whether a child really did want to begin irreversible gender-changing procedures” according to critics.
And there is more. “Requirements for legal gender recognition vary significantly across member states,” it said. “While a number of member states have adopted self-identification models, others impose medical procedures, which the European Court of Human Rights has found may infringe human rights.”
In other words, if you are a member state which has not fallen to the extremes of gender ideology, as this country has, the EU will be coming after you. Despite the CASS report, despite a general shift as our understanding regarding the harm that can be caused by telling children in particular that they are born in the wrong body, despite the shift away from the nonsense that biological sex isn’t real, the EU Commission, the unelected group who really make the decisions in Europe, are proposing to threaten countries who refuse to play along with the idiocy of gender ideology.
The madness seems to have infected most, if not all, of the offices of the EU. Last month, Advocate General of the EU Court of Justice, Richard de la Tour gave his opinion in a case involving a Bulgarian citizen, born male, who is currently living in Italy and who had been “repeatedly denied requests” to legally amend the “gender marker and name” on Bulgarian documents by Bulgarian courts.
The Advocate General stated that “under EU law provisions on freedom of movement and fundamental right to private and family life, Member States have an obligation to legally recognise the lived gender of their nationals.”
These terms are always so nebulous, so removed from reality. What if your “lived gender” is non-binary or multi-fluid or any other such made-up nonsense? How can that be reflected in the law?
Further, de la Tour adds, ‘while Member States can decide how to design such a process, they cannot request evidence of having had surgery’ and since ‘identity documents and passports are key for EU nationals to enjoy freedom of movement’ therefore EU Member States must provide travel documents matching the lived gender identity.
That’s what we have here in Ireland of course. Nor is surgery – or even counselling is required. You can swear a statement and, like magic, you’ve changed sex. It worked for Barbie Kardashian.
With this kind of overreach, its no wonder that Maya Forstater, chief executive of sex-based rights charity Sex Matters, described the EU’s Commissions plans as “sinister” while criticising “the pernicious capture of EU institutions”.
Former Austrian Green MP, Faika El-Nagashi, told The Telegraph that: “With its new LGBTIQ+ equality strategy, the European Commission is effectively following the wish list of trans activist lobby groups in Brussels, groups that are extremely well funded by the commission itself and highly influential within EU institutions,” she said.
“It is outrageous that despite protests from women’s rights groups, lesbians and gays, parents and detransitioners, the commission blatantly centres a push for self-ID laws without age restrictions across Europe, and seeks to embed gender-identity ideology across virtually every policy area including, crucially, women’s rights.”
Their words are a reminder that, while it might be easy to dismiss proposals from the EU as more woke nonsense, the European Commission – and the EU Court of Justice – are not just enormously powerful in that they can supersede our laws, but are completely captured by gender ideology. And as El-Nagashi pointed out, this has huge repercussions for women’s rights and women’s safety, because when our laws are following an ideology which which refuses to acknowledge that an adult female human is the definition of a woman, then those laws are wide open to abuse.
Where is the common sense and clarity applied to decisions on food labelling when it comes pushing strategies which would allow even children to choose their own gender? It’s a week, therefore, where we learned that the EU can define what a burger is – and is not – but couldn’t possibly tell you what a woman is. The insanity continues.
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