The European Commission is set to consider a ban on plant-based food products from being labelled with terms such as ‘sausage’, ‘burger’, or ‘steak’.
It follows a proposal from French MEP Céline Imart to make it illegal to use terms linked to animal products on labelling for products that don’t contain meat.
The Commission is currently drafting its own proposals for the reform of the common market organisation (CMO) regulation, which allows for changes to rules governing agricultural products.
These are due to be published in the coming weeks.
A number of member states, including Ireland, have expressed support for such a ban.
The EU’s Agriculture and Fisheries Council recently debated a paper from the Czech government calling for the protection of traditional names of animal-origin food.
Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia co-signed the document, while Ireland, France, and Spain are among the countries backing it.
According to the paper, an increasing number of plant-based foods have come onto the single market that are “similar in appearance, taste and consistency to products of animal origin”, and that they are “very often labelled with the names belonging to meat, eggs, honey, fish, and products made from them” despite the fact that they “differ substantially from food products of animal origin”.
The paper says that it is essential that foods that “imitate” foods of animal origin do not “mislead the consumer by their labelling”.
Farming groups welcome pressure on Commission to make changes
Welcoming reports that the EU Commission is under pressure to ban the use of dairy or meat terminology to promote vegetarian or synthetic foods, ICMSA President Denis Drennan said that “the employment of terms like ‘sausage’, ‘burger’ and ‘schnitzel’ in vegetarian or vegan foods was deliberate and cynical and must constitute a breach of any trade descriptions act as commonly understood.
“The hijacking of traditional meat and dairy terms actually constitutes an admission by the corporations involved that they are unable to convince consumers other than by such camouflage.
“Obviously, people are free to eat whatever they want but it is a matter of considerable irritation to farmers to see the very people and corporations who want to replace our naturally produced meat and dairy with their own non-meat and non-dairy products very deliberately using the terms that they know are generally understood to refer to traditional dairy and meat products,” Mr Drennan added.
Last year the European Court of Justice ruled that EU member states were prevented from introducing bans on the use of meaty names on non-meat products.
This followed a legal challenge from plant-based food producers against a French ban.
