NEW YORK — In case you haven’t heard, they’re making meat out of plants. Burgers out of soy and coconut. Fried chicken out of jackfruit. Steaks out of “cooked wheat gluten.”

Brands like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have expanded into fast food, infiltrating chains like Burger King and Dunkin’ with meatless patties and breakfast sausage.

Meat people — that’s animal meat people, meaning ranchers and farmers and their lobbyists — say the competition is welcome. But, in 24 states this year, they have worked to pass legislation to make it illegal for plant-based food to be called meat. The measures’ supporters do not want vegan or vegetarian food products to be called burgers, steaks or dogs.

In Louisiana, Mr Francis Thompson, a Democratic state senator who sponsored a bill banning meat words, said in session that the issue had gone unchecked for far too long. “Broccoli is not rice,” he said. “And certainly tofu burgers are not meat.”

In Arkansas, Mr David Hillman, a Republican state representative, was more evocative: “I want my rib-eye steak to have been walking around on four feet at one time or another.”

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Now, the alternative meat-makers are fighting back. Last week, a group of plaintiffs that includes Tofurky filed a lawsuit in Arkansas. They argue that the state’s law violates the First and 14th Amendments and condescends to consumers who understand what is meant when “burger” is modified by the word “veggie.”

Tofurky and Upton’s Naturals have also filed suits in Missouri and Mississippi, with the support of advocacy organisations the Good Food Institute and the Plant Based Foods Association. The ACLU and the Institute for Justice are also involved.

“There’s just limited words in the English language to convey a concept that the consumer already understands,” said Ms Michele Simon, the executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association. “If you want to convey something tastes like bacon, what do you do? Do you say it’s salty and fatty and, wink wink, piglike? The point is that we should not have to engage in linguistic gymnastics.”

Many of the laws also forbid using meat words to describe lab-grown meat, despite the fact that lab-grown meat is made from animal cells. (These products are still very much in development and are not sold commercially.)

The laws in Louisiana and Arkansas also limit the use of the word “rice.” (Both are top rice-producing states.) That’s putting products like cauliflower rice — which is cauliflower, “riced” — in the crosshairs.

Mr Michael Klein, a spokesman for the USA Rice Federation, called such food items “rice pretenders.”

“We don’t want to be portrayed as trying to run these products out of town,” he said. “The issue is, let’s just call it what it is. Don’t market your products on our good name.”

Mr Andy Gipson, the commissioner of Mississippi’s Agriculture and Commerce Department, said in a statement that his state’s law was just common sense. “Words mean something,” he said.

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THE VEGAN RESISTANCE

Ms Miyoko Schinner has been selling a cheeselike product made of cashews since 2014. The state of California prohibited her from calling it “vegan cheese.” She resigned herself to calling it “cultured nut product,” and for four years, cultured nut product it was.

“It was sort of a vegan secret,” she said. “If you were part of the vegan cult then you knew that the ‘cultured nut product’ meant cheese.” Her company used other phrasings — calling one product Aged English Sharp Farmhouse, for example — in an effort to evoke the banned term.

Then, at the dawn of 2018, Ms Schinner decided she couldn’t be a cultured-nut-product-monger any longer. She started labeling her wares as vegan cheese. It was, she said, “absolutely” an act of civil disobedience.

“We are civilly disobeying every step along the way at this point,” she said.

Producers like Ms Schinner say that it’s important for them to use words people recognise on their packaging. It helps them appeal to new customers and can convince vendors to sell the products next to those they resemble.

In the early 2000s, alternative milks were placed near their cow-derived counterparts, and sales began to grow. (According to data commissioned by the Good Food Institute and Plant Based Foods Association, alternative milks make up 13% of the fluid milk market.)

“That move completely changed the category,” said Ms Caroline Bushnell, an associate director at the Good Food Institute.

This has been upsetting to dairy farmers, who were already struggling before the alternative milk industry explosion. Although trade is perhaps more to blame for dairy farmers’ struggles, alternative milks have become an industry bugbear.

The U.S. meat industry is far more stable. (In 2018, Americans were expected to eat a record-setting volume of meat.) But its producers have taken notice of the milkman’s troubles.

Andy Berry, the executive vice president of the Mississippi Cattlemen’s Association, said that his members “looked at where dairy was 20 years ago and there’s a consensus that no one wants to end up where dairy is with these alternative products.” (At the moment, plant-based meat is roughly 1 per cent of the market.)

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CALL MEAT MAYBE

But vegans and vegetarians insisted that the word “meat” does not refer solely to the flesh of dead animals. The first definition of the word in Webster’s New World College Dictionary is “food, especially solid food as distinguished from drink,” although it calls that usage archaic.

“It is meat, it’s just nut meat,” said Ms Monica Stoutenborough, the owner of PuraVegan Cafe & Yoga, in St. Louis. Her cafe makes a sprouted seed-and-nut sausage. “It’s not flesh meat. But it’s nut meat!” she said.

Ms Freya Dinshah, the president of the American Vegan Society, agreed.

“We’ve had nut meats for decades, if not centuries,” she said. “We’ve had coconut milk since probably the beginning of time and if they want to be explicit they can say cow milk and we can say soy milk. The dairy industry thinks they’ve got the corner on milk.”

FOOD IDENTITY POLITICS

Ultimately, these semantic squabbles are about marketing. They’re not being fought by consumers.

“This is basically a fight between two industry sectors,” said Ms Simon of the Plant Based Foods Association.

“We didn’t pick the fight. Meanwhile, what is the consumer doing? They’re happily enjoying their meat and dairy alternatives.” THE NEW YORK TIMES