What is 'plant-based' food and how is it different from vegan or vegetarian food?

What is 'plant-based' food and how is it different from vegan or vegetarian food?

You might have noticed the label "plant-based" appearing on everything from meatless meatballs to dairy-free cheese at your local supermarket.

"Plant-based" is an increasingly popular term to describe food items that are free from animal products.

It's like vegetarian or What is 'plant-based' food and how is it different from vegan or vegetarian food?
— but without the baggage.

Vegetarianism] throughout centuries has been associated with a humourlessness, especially in the Western world," Alicia Kennedy, a food writer from New York, based in Puerto Rico, tells ABC RN's Blueprint for Living.

"[The term plant-based] lets people be a bit more flexible about when they want to eat meat, or when they don't want to eat meat, and not feel that they're taking on a new identity."

Independent think tank Food Frontier prefers "plant-based" to vegetarian or vegan when referring to meat-free proteins.

"Vegan is a very restrictive term," says Simon Eassom, Food Frontier's executive director.

"Plant-based" affords more flexibility, covering "a mixture of dietary preferences" from vegetarian and vegan to flexitarian, reducetarian and pescetarian.

"A plant-based diet is not a plant-exclusive diet," Dr Eassom says.

"A lot of people who eat a plant-based diet will occasionally consume dairy products, occasionally consume meat products, but they're predominantly eating plants."

However, Ms Kennedy, whose latest book is No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating (2023), believes the label "plant-based" can be misleading. "It has no real definitive meaning," she says.

Today, "plant-based" has become a marketing buzzword, co-opted by brands to sell everything from soft drinks (made from corn) to food that is plant-based by definition, such as pasta.

"It's flexible to the point of near-meaninglessness right now," Ms Kennedy says.

"Plant-based can mean anything that a company wants it to."

A history of the plant-based diet
There's nothing new about the plant-based diet.

Vegetarianism is an ancient practice popular among Indian and Greek philosophers thousands of years ago, and people have been eating plant-derived protein in the form of foods such as tofu, tempeh and seitan for centuries.

However, the language we use to describe diets free from meat, dairy and other animal products is constantly evolving.

The term vegetarian first appeared in the 19th century, while "vegan" was coined in the 40s to describe a diet excluding all animal products, not only meat. Veganism has since become associated with a philosophy concerned more broadly with animal welfare.

The term "plant-based" is also new, introduced in 1980 by T Colin Campbell, an American biochemist who wrote The China Study (2005), one of the world's bestselling nutrition books, and embraced by health-conscious individuals who were uninterested in the politics of veganism.

Mr Campbell, the Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, used "plant-based" to describe a diet made up of whole foods, "rich in whole grains and legumes and vegetables and fruits," Kennedy says — "not something … to indicate that a product was simply derived mostly from plants."

The rise of plant-based meat
While "plant-based" can apply to anything free from animal products, it's in plant-based meat that we've seen the most innovation in recent years.

In the 90s, British brand Quorn began producing meat substitutes from mycoprotein derived from a naturally occurring fungus.

Over the past decade, a wide range of plant-based burgers, sausages, meatballs and schnitzels made from alternate protein sources such as pea, soy, lupin, lentils and hemp has been developed.

More recently, the latest iteration of plant-based meat is trying to emulate whole cuts of meat "in chunk form" used in stews and curries.

Plant-based meat has become a common sight on fast food menus and supermarket shelves and represents a multibillion-dollar industry in Australia.

"Plant-based meats have a plate-share … between 1.5 and 3 per cent," says Dr Eassom. "By 2030, we expect about 10 per cent of plate-share to be taken up with plant-based meats."

'Plant-based' critics
But not everyone has embraced the plant-based tag.

Proponents of a whole foods diet have reservations about the processing required to produce plant-based meat.

And while many people choose to eat plant-based products due to the high levels of greenhouse gases emitted by meat production, plant-based doesn't always equal sustainable, with critics accusing some players in the sector of greenwashing.

Impossible Foods, for example, uses genetically modified soybeans to produce its plant-based meat substitutes. GM crops, including soy, are also used to feed livestock — a link Kennedy finds problematic.

She says it's concerning that "you can use the same substrate for creating animal protein in an industrial fashion as you can use to make industrial plant protein."

Another issue that bothers Kennedy is the investment of major US meat companies in plant-based alternatives.

"[The label 'plant-based' obscures] the way these companies are part of the very system and industry they purport to replace," she says.

Kennedy would like to see the introduction of regulation governing the label "plant-based".

"It demands clear definition because these companies are using the phrase to sell … a vision that isn't necessarily the most sustainable in the end," she says.