World News

To be fair I hardly ever buy packaged meat so I'm not sure how their labels would look. Though I would expect the plant industries would try and pass their plant based product as the real thing, to trick omnivorous people on buying it instead, so they would write "plant based" or whatever as small as possible if at all (depending on food regulations in the country they are selling it in, of course).

I guess such an assumption would base itself in vegetarian people being more careful with what they buy, compared to normal people, otherwise they'd be tricking them too.

Right, but 'steak' does mean a little more than that. It also would indicate a particular kind of cut of meat, which would generally indicate minimal connective tissue, tenderness, location, etc. Now, you could say "well, all that is irrelevant to this discussion", but to an extent is really is relevant. We are talking about how word meanings are being changed and how that influences consumer choice. Imagine if we started to see companies using the word 'vegetarian ' in a way that simply meant 'containing vegetables', regardless of meat content. Already terms like 'organic' are nearly meaningless in some markets. This sort of thing happens.

Imagine a company creating a half-meat and half-plant based burger and calling the product 'Vegan Beef'. Who could be confused, some might argue here, about this product? - it has 'beef' right in the name.

Strict guidelines can also protect consumers.

To return to the original point, the term 'steak' in a food context has already become nearly meaningless (or at least has so many conflicting meanings that it has lost most of its usefulness). 'Milk' is heading that way. 'Organic' is without much meaning in the US. Would you like 'meat-free' labels allowed on foods that had absolutely no muscle-tissue content, but did contain animal organ, bone, and fat content?