This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Leading nutritionist Rosemary Stanton has chided Nationals MPs for “overreacting” to the launch of a new plant-based mock meat product, saying: “Mince is a process, not a product.”

The National Farmers Federation and some Nationals MPs have raised concerns about a meat substitute, sold under the brand name Funky Fields, which looks similar to meat but is marked “100% plant based”.

Unlike traditional meat substitutes like tofu, which are sold in the chilled section alongside processed meats like ham and salami, the plant-based mince will be sold alongside minced meat in the supermarket meat aisle.

Critics have argued the product raised the issue of truth in food labelling and what products could be labelled, or made to look like, animal-based proteins like milk and meat.



“Mince is mince, mince is meat,” the deputy prime minister and Nationals leader, Michael McCormack, told the ABC. “That’s my interpretation of what mince is.”

Stanton, who helped write the current Australian Dietary Guidelines, said the response from the farming lobby to the plant-based mince product, which began being stocked in the meat sections of Woolworths supermarkets this month, was “a bit silly.”

“The amount of meat that’s recommended as a maximum in the dietary guidelines does not give you meat every night, so you really are going to need some alternatives,” she said. “It would seem to me that if there’s a plant-based mince … it would be a good option.”

Opposition agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon echoed the concerns of the Nationals MPs.

Queensland LNP senator Barry O’Sullivan even called for Woolworths to pull the product from shelves, telling the ABC: “Take it out the back and give it another name and call it whatever it is. But not ‘mince’, because that is crazy.”

Comments like these showed a misunderstanding of what mince actually meant, Stanton said. Calling a vegetable product which had been cut into very small pieces by a machine “mince” was not inaccurate.

“Mince is a process, not a product,” she said. “People need to read labelling.”

Stanton said that a significant portion of Australians were trying to have several meat-free days a week.

“I don’t understand why they would object [to plant mince], frankly,” she said. “But then, they used to object to chicken being sold alongside red meat.”

The global shift toward eating less meat — but not shunning it altogether — has been branded “reducetarianism” by an organisation that publishes cookbooks under the same name. The term has not quite caught on.

Why you’re probably a ‘reducetarian’ – and you may not even know it Read more

Despite an increase in families opting for a few meat-free meals a week, Australians are still heavy meat eaters, consuming on average 111.4kg of meat, including 45.3kg of chicken, 27.9kg of pork, 27.6kg of beef or veal, and 10.6kg of lamb or mutton each year. Chicken overtook beef as the most popular meat in Australia in 2006.

The global average meat consumption is just 34.1kg per annum. Australians ate four times more beef and veal than the global average and six times more lamb and mutton in 2015, according to the 2017 Meat and Livestock Australia state of the industry report.

That same report notes that “the red meat industry is part of our national identity”.