Mississippi will no longer ban calling veggie burgers “veggie burgers”

It looks like Mississippi is backing down from its proposed law taking aim at meatless meat products in grocery stores.

The state in July had put into effect a law banning stores from labelling products as “veggie burgers,” or using a variety of other common labels like “vegan hot dog” or “tofu bacon.” The law was immediately challenged in court by the makers of meat alternatives.

But the state withdrew those regulations Thursday and proposed new ones that would allow those labels. Under the new regulations, veggie burgers are once more in the clear — along with any product that prominently displays a qualifier like “meat free,” “meatless,” “plant-based,” “veggie-based,” “made from plants,” “vegetarian,” or “vegan.”

Mississippi had justified its earlier prohibition as an attempt to avoid consumer confusion. Consumers seeing a label like “veggie burger” might get confused and think that these products contained beef or pork. But opponents of the law claimed that this was a smokescreen — and the real goal was to crush the plant-based foods that Mississippi farmers perceived as a threat. The First Amendment, they argued, protects labels like “veggie burger” as long as consumers aren’t confused.

“The new proposed regulation is a victory for the First Amendment and for common sense,” said attorney Justin Pearson of the Institute for Justice, which sued over the original veggie burger ban, in a press release.

Mississippi isn’t the only state with a law banning the labelling of products as veggie burgers. Missouri led the way with a similar law last year, and Arkansas has since followed suit. Those cases are still making their way through the courts, however, which makes Mississippi the first state to back off from a veggie burger label ban.

Veggie burger products like those from Tofurky (which is suing in Arkansas) and Upton’s Naturals (which sued in Mississippi) have been uneventfully sold in grocery stores all around the country for years (Tofurky was founded in 1995 and Upton’s in 2006). They didn’t come under fire until recently, when sustainability, health, and climate change concerns drove a big increase in interest in meatless meat products.

That surge in interest made producers of slaughtered meat nervous. And in some states, they began pushing back with veggie burger bans. “This bill will protect our cattle farmers from having to compete with products not harvested from an animal,” said Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation president Mike McCormick in January when Mississippi’s veggie burger ban law passed in the Mississippi state House.

The problem, of course, is that state representatives are not supposed to pass laws in order to help protect their cattle farmers from having to compete with other products. And, while the government can regulate commercial speech to protect consumers, strict rules apply to any government-imposed speech restriction. For that reason, every veggie burger ban so far has met with an immediate challenge in court.

Some of these cases will likely be decided in the courts eventually, but in the case of Mississippi, it appears that the state has decided to back off rather than weather an expensive lawsuit. That’s a good thing — for Mississippi, for plant-based meat, and for consumers, who are smart enough to know what a veggie burger is and increasingly interested in eating one.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.