I could resolve this by updating react-meteor-data from 1.0.0 to 2.1.0. However, this was only possible by updating the whole Meteor app from 1.8 to 1.10.2, due to lots of dependency mismatches. Not sure if this will have additional side-effects.
Is there a way to do this on older Meteor versions, i.e. with react-meteor-data@1.0.0?