10 March 2025

Today, I'd like to talk about steak! Maybe you have heard: Texas is posturing to take over the “New York Strip” (You can read the full story HERE. TLDR: yes, the longhorn cattle came from Texas, but it stopped in Kansas City to bulk up before being chopped up for shipping to New York City's finest restaurants).

There really are so many issues to this story but I'll focus on names. You would think with all the major crises we have going on in the US today (wildfires, floods, ecological breakdown, food prices, pollution, water scarcity, and of course climate change), politicians would have something more important to talk about than what we call a particular steak.

I've been against labeling from the start of Green Bites (see my Plant Forward [No Labels] Nutrition Subscription™), but my opinion on this topic is now more nuanced. While names can be useful for identifying, explaining and connecting, they may have the opposite effect if we're not all “on the same page” about what they mean. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but nobody would know what you're talking about, if you called it a “skunk cabbage” (incidentally, spotted coming up in the woods on my hike last weekend!).

The term “plant based”, when taken at face value, would seem [to me] to mean “based upon [but not entirely comprised of] plant foods”. Culture (or corporations) may imply other things, e.g. no animal foods, or even whole-foods-plant-based-no-oil-no-sugar. If we don't agree on a definition, or just don't understand it, we may need to fill in the gray areas through discussion - something I believe we don't do often enough.

There are labels which are regulated by the FDA, USDA or independent agencies, e.g. allergens, specific health claims, organic, humane certified. Often, there is a safety aspect. Some could mean life or death (for example, failing to label peanuts as an ingredient for people with severe allergy).

Then, there are debates about naming foods which might be considered more economically motivated. The FDA regulates the production and labeling of plant-based foods, which it states must be truthful and not misleading. You must have seen politicians [funded by lobbyists] pushing restriction of the term “milk” to dairy, or trying to limit plant-based companies from using “meaty” descriptors. Personally, I don't believe that someone purchasing soy milk is going to be misled into thinking it came from a cow.

Ten years ago, the plant-based Just Mayo faced a lawsuit for labeling and marketing as if it was real mayo. Believe it or not, there is an actual government-approved definition. I can see how that might be confusing, if you thought of “just” as ONLY, rather than EQUITABLE (IMHO, that's what makes the name so clever). But charges were dropped once they included more clarity (and no egg) on the label.

Anyway, compared to concerns about allergens and ingredient misrepresentation, the chatter about what to call a piece of steak seems rather trivial, but maybe NOT to the Kansas City cattle ranchers. After all, why should Texans claim branding when the cattle they sent to KC was hardly edible? And certainly New Yorkers don't deserve a namesake just for eating it? All I know is that we should be consuming fewer of those Texas/Kansas/New York Strip steaks and more local mushrooms!