Negotiators ultimately agreed that veggie sausages and burgers can continue to be sold.
The French MEP behind the terminology ban, Céline Imart, hailed the outcome as an “indisputable victory for our farmers.”
The agreement, she added, “recognizes the value of farmers’ work and protects their products, which are the result of unique expertise, against a form of unfair competition.”
Imart, a grain farmer, also pushed for protections to extend to “cell-cultured products” — i.e. meat grown in labs — which she has previously described as a threat to traditional agriculture.
For frustrated lawmakers, the move takes Europe in the wrong direction, essentially knee-capping a nascent sector.
“It is absurd that we are attempting to regulate the naming of products that aren’t even on the European market yet,” the Greens Parliamentary negotiator on the file, Anna Strolenberg, told POLITICO ahead of Thursday’s talks on cellular meat. “Our signal to biotech pioneers is: ‘Don’t build it in Europe, move abroad.’”