Information gap shows up on plant-based food survey

Scots are more attached to their meat and two veg diet than other areas of the UK, a new survey has indicated.

Mary Creagh - UK Parliament official portraits 2017

According to a report published today, Scots are unlikely to be persuaded to take meat out of their diet - with 38 per cent never doing this while 58 per cent of Scottish consumers surveyed said they were opposed to any kind of meat tax.

However the report, Planting the Future: A Moment of Change for UK Food, warned that while plant-based foods were likely to continue to grow in importance, the debate on future protein supplies should not become polarised.

Drawn up and commissioned by the communications agency, Lexington in the run up to the COP26 conference, the report looks at the attitudes towards changing food habits as a possible method of addressing climate change.

With a foreword by former Environmental Audit Committee chair Mary Creagh, it warns of a national divide over what Britons put on their plate, with Scots in particular focused on traditional meat-based diets and unlikely to choose flexitarian alternatives, while Londoners were more likely to swap out meat.

The paper also considered the battles in the EU over dairy-alternative products using terms like ‘milk’ and ‘yoghurt', as well as attempts to prevent plant-based producers from calling their offerings ‘sausages’ or ‘burgers’ – and it said that while the debate had yet to emerge in Scotland, consumers here were sympathetic to this, with only 27 per cent in favour of plant-based products using such terminology and 48 per cent opposed.

The information and knowledge gap among consumers was also raised, with no set understanding of what the term plant-based foods actually constituted – 22 per cent of Scots thinking a product labeled this way was made from just fruit or vegetables, while 11 per cent believed it was largely made from plants but could also contain meat and/or other animal products such as dairy or eggs.

The report suggested that there was a need for an accepted, agreed definition of what ‘plant-based’ meant and whether this encompassed lab grown meat – potentially backed up by labelling.

The report also found that only 23 per cent of Scots replaced cheese or dairy with dairy-free alternatives even a few times a month – and 50 per cent never did.

An information gap over health and sustainability of plant-based products was also raised in the report, with only two fifths of Scots (41 per cent) clear on how green these alternatives were.

It made a series of recommendations to avoid this becoming another casualty of the culture war, calling on plant-based producers to clarify and evidence sustainability and nutrition claims, and factor in the broader supply chain picture, including the climate impacts of getting products from factory to plate.

Producers of plant based foods were also called on to acknowledge sustainable meat production and support a hybrid diet to avoid the issue falling into a polarised debate.

But it added that, at the same time, meat producers should avoid ‘stoking the fire’, and acknowledge that plant-based foods are likely to play an increasingly key role in the UK food sector.