Food labelling rules will be lost post-Brexit... but who actually cares?

Once we leave the EU at the end of the year, anyone anywhere can make a Cornish pasty, a Cumberland sausage or a Melton Mowbray pork pie. But what’s in a name, anyway, writes Andy Martin

According to the EU, only milk products derived from animals can be classified as milk (AFP/Getty)

I jotted it down on my shopping list (on my phone): “milk”. When I hit the aisle in M&S though, I realised: maybe I should be fined or locked up or whatever for writing that down, because I wasn’t buying “milk” at all. I should really have written “oat drink” or possibly “almond drink” or “coconut drink” – a plant-based alternative to food for baby cows. My feeling is that the calves need their mother’s udders more than I do. Meanwhile, I am not allowed to refer to alternative forms of milk as “milk”. On pain of some kind of immense bureaucratic finger-wagging at me.

The great question of whether or not you can call a veggie burger a “veggie burger” is similarly in play. We are entering a new age of rampant lexicon control. And behind the thought police are the shadowy fat cats who rule over the meat and dairy industries. When Winston Smith, in 1984, was given the job of tightening up, reforming and cutting down on people’s vocabulary with a view to enslaving them, it was all about the dire influence of communism. But Orwell got it wrong: capitalism can be just as bad when it comes to clamping down on language and brainwashing us. The corporate mind is scared of the freewheeling use of such dangerous words as “milk”.

For once, the great land of the free might really be more permissive in this department. My good friend Robert Friedin, Princeton professor and author of the recent Adventures in English Syntax, tells me that he can go down to his local store in Princeton and buy “coconut milk” and, should he wish to, oat milk and soy milk and almond milk. He has a whole spectrum of milks at his disposal. He also points out that Princeton menus regularly feature “veggie burger”.