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The growing popularity of plant-based dairy and meat products has engendered a series of legal disputes about how these products may be labeled and advertised.

Plaintiffs have filed a number of largely unsuccessful consumer class actions alleging that packages promising soy milk and veggie burgers tricked them into thinking that they were buying the animal versions.

Several states have proposed or enacted statutes forbidding manufacturers from using meaty descriptors to market plant-based foods — although at least one such statute had been ruled unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently got in on the action, issuing a February draft guidance providing the agency's "current view on the naming of plant-based foods that are marketed and sold as alternatives for milk."

The controversy reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit earlier this year. Turtle Island Foods SPC v. Strain was a case first filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana.

The Fifth Circuit issued its decision in Strain in April, reversing the lower court's ruling that Louisiana's Act No. 273 violates the First Amendment.

To continue reading Jonah Knobler and Henry Wainhouse's article in Law360, please click here.