If you walk into a store and think you are buying vegan food and it turns out to be made of meat, are you going to be outraged?

That is at the heart of a mayonnaise controversy that has been whipped up by Hampton Creek, which makes vegan food and has a mayonnaise they want to sell as mayonnaise. But Federal law put a stop to just slapping a name on a fake product over 70 years ago, that is why the Code of Federal Regulations, which govern ‘standards of identity’, was created in 1938.

Plus, just inventing your own definitions for food annoys people:



But now Hampton Creek is saying it is an egg conspiracy too. The American Egg Board, they contend, engaged Whole Foods to attempt to block the distribution of their egg-less mayonnaise product; they tried to get people to lobby against it, and they even paid bloggers to write about it.

The American Egg Board pays bloggers? If I try to get government money right now, it will take about a year to receive it so I'd be skeptical of that claim. When it comes to food activists, they are always alleging someone (else) is being paid off. I wrote about this, and no one paid me anything so I feel a little cheated. I did sort of get paid one time - I wrote about an organic coffee company that was *gasp* honest about what "organic" does and does not mean and they sent me a free packet of their coffee - but that was after the fact.

So if NRDC or Mother Jones or Sourcewatch wants to claim I am a shill for Big Organic Coffee, I suppose they can, but it would be just as inaccurate as everything else they claim about pretty much everything.