There is a particular species of supermarket product that has always struck me as engaged in a small, ongoing act of self-deception, and it is the plant-based “meat” patty, sitting there in its glossy packet, doing its level best to convince you it is something it manifestly is not. It has never once fooled me, and according to a new piece of Australian research, it hasn’t fooled most of you either – however cleverly the marketing department has tried.

Researchers at the University of Adelaide surveyed close to a thousand Australian adults, in a properly designed experiment built to reflect the country by age, gender and state, testing whether clever advertising could shift how meat-eaters actually feel about plant-based alternatives. The advertising, it turns out, barely mattered. What mattered was a set of pre-existing beliefs sitting quietly underneath all of it: that plant-based “meat” is riskier to buy, and worse value, than the real thing. Lead researcher Dr Cassidy Shaw put it plainly, noting the team had expected the style of advertising to carry more weight, but for most meat-eaters, existing perceptions of risk and poor value simply outweighed anything a jaunty ad campaign could do about it.

I confess I find this enormously satisfying, in the way one finds it satisfying when a study finally proves, with proper peer-reviewed rigour, something you’d already worked out yourself standing in the chilled aisle wondering why a facsimile of a sausage costs more than an actual sausage.

The bit where it gets genuinely interesting for those of us over 60

Here’s where this stops being simply a marketing story and becomes a generational one. The underlying academic literature the Adelaide team drew on is consistent and unambiguous on one point: older consumers are considerably more reluctant than younger generations when it comes to alternative food products of any kind, plant-based meat very much included. Separate Australian consumer research backs this up with real numbers – Baby Boomers were found to be the least likely generational cohort to have ever tried a plant-based meat product at all, trailing well behind Millennials and Gen Z, who’ve both had considerably more curious relationships with the stuff.

I don’t think this reluctance is simply stubbornness, whatever the marketing industry might privately believe. It’s worth noting that among the older vegetarians who do exist in this age bracket, the research shows they’re motivated overwhelmingly by health, not the ethical or environmental concerns driving younger converts. In other words, when someone over 60 does engage with plant-based eating, they’re doing so for exactly the sort of pragmatic, results-focused reason you’d expect from a generation raised to ask what something is actually good for, rather than what it symbolises.

So, is it actually meat?

Here’s my honest answer, and I don’t think the marketing industry is going to love it: no, obviously not, and I rather think the industry’s persistent insistence on borrowing meat’s own vocabulary – “meat,” “mince,” “sausage,” “bacon” – is precisely the thing quietly working against it. The Adelaide study found that when researchers tried softer, more emotional advertising with younger consumers, it actually backfired, making them trust the product’s quality less, not more. There’s a lesson buried in that finding for the entire category: people are not, on the whole, fools, and treating a plant protein like it’s simply meat wearing a clever disguise seems to make audiences trust it less, not more, once they clock the sleight of hand.

Call it what it actually is – a genuinely well-engineered plant protein, with its own qualities, its own texture, its own reason for existing – and you remove the entire, faintly patronising premise that it needs to borrow meat’s name to be taken seriously. The Adelaide researchers found rational, factual messaging about actual product quality worked considerably better with younger consumers and existing vegetarians alike than emotional appeals ever did. There’s no reason to think an older, more sceptical audience would respond any differently, and every reason, based on this research, to think they’d respond even more strongly to simple honesty than anyone else would.

The final bite

None of this is an argument against plant-based food existing, improving, or genuinely earning a place at the table for the people who want it there, environmental and animal welfare reasons very much included. It’s an argument against the industry’s slightly desperate insistence on calling it something it isn’t, and expecting the rest of us not to notice. The Adelaide research suggests most Australians, and older Australians most emphatically of all, have already noticed. The honest move now, surely, is for the industry to stop asking a chickpea to audition for a role it was never built to play, and let it simply be excellent at being a chickpea instead.