

From the eu Parliament document: *3. ‘Meat products’ means processed products resulting from the processing of meat or from the further processing of such processed products, so that the cut surface shows that the product no longer has the characteristics of fresh meat. Names that fall under Article 17 of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 that are currently used for meat products and meat preparations shall be reserved exclusively for products containing meat.
These names include, for example:
- Steak
- Escalope
- Sausage
- Burger
- Hamburger
- Egg yolk
- Egg white*
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-10-2025-0161_EN.html Use ctrl+f “burger” to find it in the text.
This not only affects vegetarian food, but also salmon steak for example. It’s a populist political move that doesn’t seem to be backed up by any linguistic science, as if mystery sausages haven’t been a thing for centuries. As long as it looks like a sausage, it is a sausage. It’s also not law yet, the member states still have to approve those amendements.
Ps, this gave me an idea for possible vegetarian branding: names like “not a burger” seem to still be allowed, so a line of foodstuffs called “not a sausage” etc might be fun.


Afaik fish is not considered meat, definitely not in colloquial language. With a quick search I found another EU article which mentions meat and fish, and they list meat and fishery products as being different things: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/hygiene-rules-for-food-of-animal-origin.html
What that article includes under meat: “Meat, including domestic ungulates (bovine, porcine, ovine and caprine species); poultry and lagomorphs (farmed birds, rabbits, hares and rodents); farmed and wild game; minced meat, meat preparations and mechanically separated/recovered meat; and meat products.”