> stop thinking of certain vegan cheeses as substitutes for animal cheeses
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).
Why do we even begin with naming vegan food products after the items they are meant to represent?
"Cheese" is made from milk. "Vegan cheese" as a label is specifically targeted at being "like milk cheese" and thus intends to replicate it.
If you want
> Why can't it just be treated as a food in itself?
we should entirely dispense with imitating, and create an entirely new food category whose principle is "vegan" and not "like real food minus animal". Invent new stuff. Ferment things from plants but do not reuse any labels that are derived from animals.
If you do not do this, people will still bring this up, because their expectations are intentionally shaped by how something is called.
Don't call vegan cheese as "cheese" if you want it to shape its own path as a new sort of food product.
edit: same with "cakes" which require butter and eggs in their traditional forms. Make something new but perhaps do not call it a cake? Make a new word that sounds catchy (we do all the time, and incorporate these into our language, e.g., Kleenex, google, "cloud" for servers, ...).