In food ingredient labeling, some food items do not require expending. E.g, Article 19 from the relevant EU regulation:
The following foods shall not be required to bear a list of ingredients:
fresh fruit and vegetables, including potatoes, which have not been peeled, cut or similarly treated;
carbonated water, the description of which indicates that it has been carbonated;
fermentation vinegars derived exclusively from a single basic product, provided that no other ingredient has been added;
cheese, butter, fermented milk and cream, to which no ingredient has been added other than lactic products, food enzymes and micro-organism cultures essential to manufacture, or in the case of cheese other than fresh cheese and processed cheese the salt needed for its manufacture;
foods consisting of a single ingredient, where:
the name of the food is identical to the ingredient name; or
the name of the food enables the nature of the ingredient to be clearly identified.
An interesting regulatory intervention to promote replacement of animal products could be to either require expansion of the details on these animal products (seems unlikely, but may be possible to push from a health perspective) or to also similarly exempt key alt proteins.
Exempting alt proteins seems unlikely to me. The presumed rationale for this exemption is that these are close to single-ingredient foodstuffs whose single ingredient is (or whose few ingredients are) obvious, so requiring them to bear an ingredient list is pointless.
Yeah, I mostly agree. My thinking is that maybe there are some cases where there are non-obvious ingredients (like the enzymes and microbes added to make cheese). But mostly I’m interested in the other direction—getting animal product replacements more simple to make use of.
Say, I’m sure that the cultivated meat industry has interest in being able to label their meat as something close to a single ingredient, rather than to write all of the ingredients in the cellular medium.
But, yeah, I am not hopeful that there’d be a really good intervention along these lines
In food ingredient labeling, some food items do not require expending. E.g, Article 19 from the relevant EU regulation:
An interesting regulatory intervention to promote replacement of animal products could be to either require expansion of the details on these animal products (seems unlikely, but may be possible to push from a health perspective) or to also similarly exempt key alt proteins.
fyi: @vicky_cox
Exempting alt proteins seems unlikely to me. The presumed rationale for this exemption is that these are close to single-ingredient foodstuffs whose single ingredient is (or whose few ingredients are) obvious, so requiring them to bear an ingredient list is pointless.
Yeah, I mostly agree. My thinking is that maybe there are some cases where there are non-obvious ingredients (like the enzymes and microbes added to make cheese). But mostly I’m interested in the other direction—getting animal product replacements more simple to make use of.
Say, I’m sure that the cultivated meat industry has interest in being able to label their meat as something close to a single ingredient, rather than to write all of the ingredients in the cellular medium.
But, yeah, I am not hopeful that there’d be a really good intervention along these lines