Red flag

Halving our red meat consumption in favour of plant-based alternatives would be good for our health, our wallets and the planet, New Zealand research reveals.

- NIKI BEZZANT

Kiwis' love of meat began long before the day the Dunedin embarked for Britain in February 1882 full of frozen Oamaru lamb and mutton. That journey kicked off an export wave of animal products and a love for roast dinners that's still going strong 140 years later.

On average, we New Zealanders eat our way through 34kg of beef, lamb and pork each year, a 2021 Australian study found. For many of us, the idea of going meat-free is not on the table.

It is possible, though, that we have now reached "peak meat" in Aotearoa. The study on global meat intakes found that on average, each New Zealander ate 75.2kg of meat (including chicken) in 2019, down from 86.2kg in 2000. We're one of only a handful of countries whose consumption is going down - although there's nuance within that: we're eating less beef and lamb but more chicken and pork.

Alongside this trend, there's been a growth in the range and variety of meat alternatives in our supermarkets and restaurants. But it's tricky to know if there's a corresponding increase in our intake of meat alternatives.

When I press University of Otago nutrition researcher Dr Andrew Reynolds to take an educated guess on this, he says he believes that alternative meats still make up a tiny portion of our overall protein intake.

"I guess if we took Australia as analogous to New Zealand, [alternative meats] do have a lot of marketing hype. However, the portion of the market taken up by plant-based meat alternatives is tiny still - about four or five grams a day when you average it out across all Australians.

"It will grow; don't get me wrong. But at the moment, that's still not big compared with flesh intakes."

Data from the Ministry of Health's Dietary Habits survey seems to back that up: it found that in 2020, just 7% of people said they never or infrequently ate meat. Half of respondents said they ate red meat three or more times a week, men more so than women.