The Show-Me State has recently shown good faith to the meat industry.

A federal judge recently declined to block a Missouri law that prohibits companies that create plant-based products from calling those products “meat.”

The Missouri legislature approved the law in 2018, giving their state’s department of agriculture the power to investigate and refer potential labeling violations to the attorney general’s office or a county prosecutor. The state law says that a product cannot be marketed as meat unless it comes from an animal with two or four feet.

Of course, a company that produces something called tofurky products, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Good Food Institute appealed U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr.’s decision, arguing the law violates free-speech rights.

I’m all for freedom of speech, but I’m also for the truth.

Look up the definition of “meat,” and you will see that it is a noun meaning “the flesh of an animal (especially a mammal) as food.” Plain and simple, meat cannot originate from a plant, unless those plants passed through an animal (especially a mammal) to result in meat.

As I have written here before, I am all for the creation of other protein sources to help feed our hungry world, but do not try to call those products what they aren’t. Just as you cannot get “milk” from something that does not have teats, you cannot get meat from something that has not walked or flown on this earth.