In a move that could make American livestock producers envious, the European Union (EU) Parliament is moving to ban labeling plant-based and cell-cultured products with common terms such as “burger,” “sausage,” or “steak.”
The EU Parliament voted 355 to 247 for a tighter definition of meat as coming from “edible parts of animals” and specified that names such as steak, sausage, burger and escalope must be reserved for products containing meat and must exclude cell-cultured products.
The move comes as more Europeans are moving away from meat, and livestock producers see growing competition from such processed alternatives. Still, the EU Parliament’s vote is just the first step because the EU’s member states and the EU Commission also weigh in on parliament votes.
“A steak, an escalope, or a sausage are products from our livestock farms, period. No laboratory substitutes, no plant-based products,” said France’s Celine Imart, the member of parliament who introduced the measure, according to Euractiv news website.
The EU vote naturally got a lot of pushback from companies selling protein products and others who maintain consumers know the difference between a vegetarian or non-meat product and an actual meat product.
In the U.S., the battle over meat labels has largely played out at the state level. National Agricultural Law Center (NALC) highlights that an increasing number of states have passed laws preventing cell-cultured food products from being labeled as meat. Florida passed a law preventing plant-based products from being marketed as “meat,” though the law has caveats that it does not go into effect until at least 11 states have passed similar laws. Right now, seven other states, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia have similar laws, the NALC stated.
Oklahoma has a law set to go into effect on Nov. 1, that also requires companies to specifically label terms such as cell-cultivated or plant-based on food labels as well. — Chris Clayton, DTN ag policy editor
