Remember the vegiburger debate?
It's still not over.
Why we wrote to Manfred Weber.
Today the NoConfusion coalition, led by EVU and WePlanet, put two things into the world on the same morning: an open letter to Manfred Weber, President of the EPP Group in the European Parliament, and a satirical video about where the words “burger,” “sausage,” “nugget” and “steak” actually come from. One is addressed to the most powerful person in the debate right now. The other is addressed to everyone who has ever bought a veggie burger and understood, correctly, what was in it.
The letter
On 17 June, Parliament closed a chapter that had already reopened once before. After collapsing in December and getting revived under the Cyprus presidency, the trilogue agreement on the CMO revision reserved 31 animal-species and meat-cut terms for animal products, while leaving format words like burger, sausage and nuggets available to plant-based producers. That is a already a compromise, hard fought, and it should be the end of it.
It might not be. Céline Imart, the rapporteur who steered this file, has said publicly that she sees the exclusion of burger, sausage and nuggets as unfinished business, and that she intends to bring them back at the next opportunity. If she does, this becomes the third vote on banning these words in six years, and the second in this mandate alone.
So we wrote to Weber directly, because the EPP group is the one that decides whether this gets tabled again. The letter asks for two things: a clear statement that the EPP will not support extending reserved-term restrictions to format words, and a nudge to EPP negotiators to spend their political capital on competitiveness and food security instead of relitigating a question that consumers, farmers and 600 organisations across 22 countries have already answered.
We quote Weber back to himself in the letter, because he made our argument for us before we did. Ahead of the October plenary debate, he told the press “people are not stupid.” We agree completely, which is exactly why we think this fight is beneath the institution. Nobody standing in a supermarket veggie-aisle looks at a veggie sausage and wonders if it came from a pig.
The numbers back this up. BALPro puts the cost of the restrictions already adopted at around €250 million for the German alternative protein industry alone, in repackaging, rebranding and lost sales. Multiply that across 27 member states and you get a sense of what reopening the file would cost, at a moment when European households are still feeling a squeeze and plant-based proteins remain one of the more affordable items on the shelf. Systemiq’s independent analysis puts the upside the other way: with a stable regulatory environment, alternative proteins could add €111 billion a year in gross value added to the EU economy by 2040, support more than 400,000 jobs, and build a €60 billion export market. Naming disputes do not help farmers. What really happens is they push investment toward jurisdictions that offer founders more certainty than Brussels currently does.
The video
Letters land with institutions. Videos land with everyone else, so we made one for the Hamburger Debate that does the same argument differently: it takes the words themselves apart.
“Hamburger” is named after Hamburg. There has never been any ham in a hamburger, and nobody has ever been confused by that. “Sausage” comes from the Latin salsus, meaning salted, and says nothing about what is inside it. “Nugget” started as a term for a lump of gold, long before it meant anything you’d dip in sauce. Even “steak” traces back to roasting meat on a stake, which is the kind of etymology that writes its own visual gag.
The point the video makes with jokes is the same point the letter makes with figures: these words have always described a shape, a texture, a way of preparing food, not a guarantee of what’s inside. If “hamburger” survived two centuries without anyone mistaking it for pork, or better yet, a citizen of Hamburg, “veggie burger” will survive just fine too.
Why release both together
The letter is the ask. The video is the reason a journalist, an MEP’s staffer, or a curious member of the public might actually read the letter. We’re sending both to EU press contacts today, because the strongest version of this story is not “an NGO wrote a letter.” It’s “600 organisations across 22 countries are telling the EPP that this fight is over, and here’s five centuries of food language proving they’re right.” Weber said people are not stupid. We’re taking him at his word, and asking the EPP to act accordingly.