Grilled meat check: Many tempting offers with cheap meat

During the four-week study period, 90 percent of the 196 barbecue products examined with discounts were of animal origin, 95 percent of which were from conventional animal husbandry. According to the WWF, one in five advertised products came from abroad. Only one in ten products was vegetarian or vegan.Vienna. “These are the wrong incentives and signals: the leaflets are full of special discounts on meat instead of promoting regional organic produce and plant-based alternatives. This makes it difficult to make a climate-friendly and healthy decision, even though more and more people want to eat sustainably,” said Pegah Bayaty, spokesperson for sustainable nutrition at WWF Austria.

59 kilograms of meat per person

In Austria, annual meat consumption is on average 59 kilograms per capita, three to five times higher than recommended by environmental and health experts. In return, the WWF called for a fundamental rethink by supermarkets and politicians towards a sustainable nutritional transition: “Due to rising prices, the federal government should abolish VAT on fruit, vegetables and pulses and present a package of measures for a sustainable nutritional transition. So far, little to nothing has happened here,” criticizes Bayaty.

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In addition, criticism was levelled at the fact that the soya feed for the heavily discounted conventional meat from Austria is often imported from other regions of the world. “Only in organic farming is feeding without rainforest soya guaranteed. In contrast, imported soya is usually used to feed conventionally farmed animals – especially for pig fattening – for which species-rich habitats such as tropical rainforests and savannahs are destroyed around the world. In addition, animal welfare standards are significantly lower,” said the WWF.

For the current study, the WWF evaluated the barbecue assortment in the flyers of Billa, Billa Plus, Spar, Lidl, Hofer and Penny between April 18 and May 16, 2024. A total of 196 barbecue products were on special offer, 177 of which were meat products.