Eating habits

Pick up a package labeled "vegan" in a US grocery store, and no federal regulation actually defines what that word means. The FDA said so itself, in writing, in 2025. India takes the opposite approach: a business needs government pre-approval before it can print that word on packaging at all. Japan built a national standard for the word, but for tourists rather than its own residents. And in South Korea, the question of whether school meals should offer a vegetarian option went all the way to the Constitutional Court, which declined to answer it. Vegetarian and vegan populations are growing in all four places. None of them chose to regulate the same thing.