Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

‘Veggie burger’ ban: bad for consumers and climate

Jytte Guteland 20th October 2020

The meat industry wants terms such as ‘veggie burger’ banned. This is less about confusion, more about competition.

veggie burger, vegetarian, vegan
Jytte Guteland

This week the European Parliament will vote on the common agricultural policy. We want a sustainable CAP, aligned with the Paris agreement and the European Climate Law, on which the parliament recently adopted a position. Judging from what´s on the table, however, we are far from it. 

One small aspect of the CAP could have a big impact. It’s the issue of whether to ban ‘meaty’ terms—such as ‘burger and ‘sausage’—for vegetarian products, and further restrict marketing of plant-based alternatives to dairy.

Dietary choices

Products such as ‘veggie burger’ or ‘plant based-steak’ have in some cases been on the market for decades. Consumers are familiar with these names, which help to support their dietary choices. 

Current European Union denominations and labelling rules, as laid out in the Food Information to Consumers Regulation, are clear and adequate. Additional restrictions would harm the competitiveness of plant-based food producers—a growing contributor to European jobs and investment—which have built brands, product portfolios, intellectual property rights and strong customer bases on these familiar terms.  


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

Rather than genuinely caring about consumers making the right choices, it seems the meat industry is worried about the competition from plant-based products. As a frequent consumer of the latter, it never crossed my mind that the names could be confusing. 

In fact, the evidence indicates consumers are not misled by plant-based products. In one survey, 95 per cent of German consumers reported that they never bought the wrong product because they confused plant-based with animal-based food.  

There would be no problem in adding descriptions or qualifiers to make the origin of the products even clearer—this reflects current market practice in any case. It would not involve the European Parliament taking away product names with which European citizens are already familiar. A recent survey by the BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, found that over 68 per cent of consumers from 11 European countries supported ‘meaty’ names for plant-based food products, as long as they were clearly labelled as plant-based or vegetarian.

Nearly 100,000 people across Europe have signed petitions opposing these proposals. A diverse range of civil-society organisations has also made clear their opposition.

Firm position

The European Parliament recently adopted its position on the European Climate Law, cornerstone of the European Green Deal. As rapporteur I was happy that we obtained a commitment to a 60 per cent reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, compared with 1990. With this target the parliament takes a firm position to bring Europe’s climate efforts more in line with science and our citizens, who want Europe to reach the climate-neutrality objective and to respect the Paris agreement.

Food has a major role to play in reaching this target—so the Farm to Fork Strategy is at the heart of the Green Deal. Agriculture will have to contribute considerably to the 2050 and upcoming 2030 climate targets. It is responsible for 10.3 per cent of the EU’s GHG emissions and nearly 70 per cent of these come from the animal sector. 

The Farm to Fork Strategy aims to achieve a sustainable food system that can bring environmental, health and social benefits, offer economic gains and ensure that a recovery from the pandemic puts Europe on to a sustainable path. The strategy includes plans to promote plant-based diets, to reduce not only the risk of life-threatening diseases but also the environmental impact of the food system.

Restrictive labelling would not only hinder the development of the plant-based industry. It would go counter to the objectives of the strategy and the Sustainable Healthy Diets: Guiding Principles document jointly issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Encouraging trends

It should not only be up to us as individuals to save the climate: the sectors and countries that emit the most must also contribute the most. But we need to embrace and encourage trends that make it easier for consumers to make environmentally friendly choices. Europeans are becoming increasingly conscious of the environmental, ethical and health impacts of their diet and are starting to change their food consumption accordingly. The number of vegetarians, vegans and ‘flexitarians’ is increasing.

EU annual meat consumption is projected to decline by 1.1 kilogrammes per capita by 2030. The number of flexitarians is increasing across all generations. In particular, the plant-based market share of the total ‘meat’ market tends to be relatively high in western Europe: in the Netherlands and Belgium it is 11 per cent, in Germany 9 per cent, in Italy 7 per cent, and in Sweden 5 per cent.

Banning veggie burgers and other ‘meaty’ names would risk making the European Parliament appear distant from European citizens. We should not confiscate these names for plant-based products, in the mistaken belief it would show solidarity with farmers or producers in the meat sector or even a respect for tradition. The status quo is fair.

Jytte Guteland

Jytte Guteland MEP is co-ordinator for the Socialists and Democrats of the European Parliament Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. She is currently rapporteur for the EU Climate Law.

You are here: Home / Economy / ‘Veggie burger’ ban: bad for consumers and climate

Most Popular Posts

Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic
Orbán,Hungary,Russia,Putin,sanctions,European Union,EU,European Parliament,commission,funds,funding Time to confront Europe’s rogue state—HungaryStephen Pogány

Most Recent Posts

reality check,EU foreign policy,Russia Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a reality check for the EUHeidi Mauer, Richard Whitman and Nicholas Wright
permanent EU investment fund,Recovery and Resilience Facility,public investment,RRF Towards a permanent EU investment fundPhilipp Heimberger and Andreas Lichtenberger
sustainability,SDGs,Finland Embedding sustainability in a government programmeJohanna Juselius
social dialogue,social partners Social dialogue must be at the heart of Europe’s futureClaes-Mikael Ståhl
Jacinda Ardern,women,leadership,New Zealand What it means when Jacinda Ardern calls timePeter Davis

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The winter issue of the Progressive Post magazine from FEPS is out!

The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—'polycrisis', for example, even 'permacrisis'. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?

This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The EU recovery strategy: a blueprint for a more Social Europe or a house of cards?

This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube