After almost seven years of wrangling, the European Union is set to ban veggie and vegan food from using meat-related names – with a few important exceptions.
When the European Parliament last year voted to end “consumer confusion” by stopping plant-based food companies from using terms connected with animal products, it had been thought the bloc was about to say do widzenia to the bean burger and adieu to the veggie sausage.
But the decision last week by the European Parliament, European Commission and Council of Europe to ban 31 words, most linked very specifically to animal meat and animal parts – and in defiance of the pleas of a cross-party group of UK MPs, backed by MFM co-founder Paul McCartney, and food businesses across the EU, UK and US – has also seen key terms win a reprieve.
So while there will be no more plant-based beef, veal, pork, poultry, chicken, turkey, duck, goose, lamb, mutton, ovine, goat, drumstick, tenderloin, sirloin, flank, loin, ribs, shoulder, shank, chop, wing, breast, ribeye, T-bone, rump, bacon, steak or liver within the 27 countries of the EU, plant-based burgers, mince, sausages, nuggets, ham, schnitzel, chorizo and pastrami live to fight another delicious day. YouGov statistics back up the wisdom of the move: 92 per cent of respondents to a recent survey said they had never bought, or could not recall buying, a plant-based sausage or burger thinking it contained meat.
The battle against meaty monikers has been rumbling on since at least 2018, when a French MP claimed unwitting shoppers were being fooled into buying plant-based products (we’ve all done it: you head to the supermarket for a juicy ribeye only to find yourself, horrified, tucking into a cauliflower steak at dinner time). Not only was his amendment to an agriculture bill passed, but the next year another French lawmaker had brought the gripe to Brussels, which has culminated seven years later in this ban.
“It is incomprehensible that our policymakers are focusing on made-up issues, when the world is at crisis,” said Rafael Pinto, senior policy manager at the European Vegetarian Union, which together with WePlanet leads the No Confusion Coalition of more than 600 European organisations and food companies. While he hailed a victory for common sense with the protection of the most frequently used words, he said the ban was “not a censorship that makes Europeans proud”.
Rob de Schutter, head of communications at WePlanet, called on the three bodies responsible for the EU’s decision-making process to reflect on their decision, saying: “This ban does not help a single farmer … Most of them look at these new regulations as a distraction from real problems farmers face. It does not improve a single consumer’s life. It exists to protect niche political interests, nothing more.”
In a reference to the decision to extend the naming ban to new foods such as those grown from cells, which aren’t even available on the market in the EU yet, he added: “We’re even banning things that don’t exist yet.”
Companies will be given three years to exhaust stocks of products that fall foul of the new rules, and presumably to think about what they might be rechristened. But, given no EU-wide impact assessment or public consultation has taken place, it also allows time for legal challenges to what De Schutter calls “a plastic trophy in a culture war no one asked for”. Watch this space.