You Are Eating Fermented Mold — Popular Vegetarian Meat Company Hit with False Advertising Lawsuit

by Yelena Sukhoterina

For vegetarians (especially new ones), it is often a challenge to find convenient, meat-free products to serve as a main course, which makes it especially disappointing when one big corporations end up lying about the ingredients that make up their favorite products. Many people turn to the convenience of meat-style products ranging from vegans sausages to mock chicken strips and chicken nuggets in order to make the transition.

But are they really getting something healthier, or just an inferior-quality processed food product devoid of real nutrition?

In a recent lawsuit, a vegetarian “meat” company Quorn Foods Inc. has been accused of pretending their main ingredient, called mycoprotein, is a type of a mushroom, when in reality the ingredient is actually a fancy name for a type of mold.

Quorn’s meat substitute products such as meat-less sausages, “chik’n” bites, and “fish-less” fingers are sold in big chains such as Whole Foods all over the country, some European countries, and Australia.

On their packages, such as the one for Chik’n Nuggets they proudly announce the following:

“Chik’n Nuggets are made with mycoprotein (‘myco’ is Greek for ‘fungi’) and are completely meatless & soy-free. There are believed to be over 600,000 varieties of fungi in the world, many of which are among the most sought after foods like varieties of mushrooms, truffles, and morels.”

The label is extremely misleading, the lawsuit alleges, because the two claims made are technically not false: mycoprotein is derived from a fungi, and mushrooms are the most well-known and eaten type of fungi. But by putting the two sentences together, Quorn makes it sounds like mycoprotein is just like a type of a mushroom, which it is not. It allegedly is the other type of fungi – mold, believe or not.

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