Last November, for the first time, the Food and Drug Administration declared cultivated chicken, grown by Upside Foods, safe to eat.
In March, the FDA also gave a nod to cultivated chicken made by Good Meat, an arm of Eat Just Inc. Both companies still have to receive clearance from the Agriculture Department (USDA), which oversees the part of the production process after the cells are harvested, before selling any cultivated chicken to consumers in the U.S.(Peterson & Newman, What Exactly Is Cultivated Meat, and When Can We Eat It?, 2023).
Cultured meat can only be legally sold in Singapore for now,after the first beef burger was produced in the UK in 2013. In 2020, Singapore's Food Agency approved the nuggets after Eat Just submitted a safety assessment to the agency's "novel food" working group, whose seven members are outside experts on food science, toxicology, nutrition, epidemiology and other fields. Eat Just's chief executive, Josh Tetrick, hoped that Singapore's decision to approve his company's "GOOD Meat" chicken nuggets would spur regulators in the United States and countries in Western Europe to move faster to regulate lab-grown meat(Ives, 2020).
What is cultivated meat?
According to some surveys, several respondents had thought that plant-based meat from the likes of Beyond Meat was lab-grown (Frederick, 2022). For a start, plant-based meats don't derive from animal cells. Instead, components of plants are mixed to try to mimic the taste and texture of meat. Beyond Meat Inc., for instance, uses yellow-pea protein, potato starch, canola oil and other ingredients to make burger patties, sausages and nuggets.
On the other hand, cultivated meat contains meat grown from animal cells. To produce it, companies take a sample of stem cells from an animal, often through a biopsy from a live animal or a fertilized egg. Cultivated meat is usuallyproduced by placing certain poultry and livestock cells into stainless-steel tanks, the so-called bioreactors, where they are fed nutrients and oxygen before being harvested and formed into meat products (Peterson & Newman, 2023).The process produces just meat, not complete animals with bones and nervous systems. After some weeks, the cells are harvested and formed into shapes that consumers recognize.
Collecting the initial sample of cells often doesn't hurt the animal. However, there are times when a sample is taken from something like a small shrimp, for instance, that doesn't survive. Nonetheless, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, cheered the FDA's stance that Upside's chicken is safe to eat, but, until it is available, the group wants people to give up meat and dairy products now (Reiman, 2023).
Greater consumption of plant-based products, lab-grown meat and insects could certainly contribute to a more sustainable food system. In fact, traditional meat and dairy industries account for the bulk of emissions that come from food and agriculture. The regulatory nod, however, comes as consumer interest in plant-based meat appears to have waned, with sales growth slowing down. Plant-based meat has been disappointing in terms of taste and texture and they've also generally been too expensive compared to real meat. Consumers have also been put off by some plant-based products which they perceive to be highly processed(Cooper, 2022). This perception seems true, as sales growth of plant-based meat, which soared by more than 40% in 2020 in both the US and the UK, has lost some momentum, according to consumer data groups Spins and Kantar. Retail sales by value fell 1,6% in the first 10 months of 2022 in the US. In the UK they rose by 5% compared with 14% the year before (Terazono & Evans, 2022).
Still, a growing number of food-tech investors believe that lab-grown meat will help improve the current offering as well as enhance the taste of plant-based products, boosting their popularity. Its technology can transform an average plant-based product (Wardle, 2022).
Italy’s disapproval and food fight
Italy has said no grazie to lab-grown meat. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's ban on lab-grown meat and animal feed may simply mean her rightwing government seeks to protect local farmers, but there does not seem to be a need for that quite yet. In fact, a recent academic study estimates that a scaled-up plant would produce beef at $60/kg. A steak costs a third of that at the supermarket. However, over time the cost of alt-meat should fall as the technology improves and the scale of production expands. McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that cultivated meat might get to cost parity within the next decade, but, before that, this type of food would likely be a niche offering only (Opinion Lex, 2023). Still, the industry has made progress. When Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled for the first time a burger made with lab-grown beef on camera in 2013, it cost $330,000 to make. The CEO of Upside said in 2017 that the company could make a pound of meat for less than $2,400. The company has declined to provide more-recent figures but said it expects to initially sell its product at a premium to conventional meat.
Therefore, Meloni's ban looks more like an exercise in brand protection, given her nationalistic stripes, which would be her own brand, together with that of traditional Italian food.Italy is indeed intensifying its crusade against EU sustainable farming rules and lab-grown foods to promote its signature cuisine. Suffice it to say that Rome has hit out at the EU Commission for not opposing plans in Ireland to put health warnings on alcoholic beverages, including Italian wine. And, of course, Premier Giorgia Meloni has proposed banning lab-grown meat.
However, such on-the-hoof thinking fails to grasp the seriousness of the climate challenge. Already, agriculture contributes more than 14% of global carbon emissions. As the global population grows and becomes wealthier, we will inevitably have to reconsider what we eat. Going the sustainable, agritech way might thus offer another way.
On 8 May, Italy’s agriculture and food sovereignty minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, attended a conference in Milan titled “Italian food under attack” in a show of support to agricultural trade body Coldiretti.
Coldiretti has warned that the Italian food industry is under serious threat from “health terrorism and climate extremism”.
The powerful farmers’ organization has been a vocal opponent of certain EU legislative proposals aimed at cutting carbon emissions and making farming more sustainable. It says they will ultimately harm their industry and “Italian food excellence”.
After the conference, Lollobrigida tweeted: “Mammoth meatballs, lab-grown food, 3D-printed fish, milk without cows. This will make large multinationals profit and destroy our civilization.”
The minister, a senior member of the ruling Brothers of Italy party, said cultivated meat products were “slush” in an interview with Reuters. He also pushed back against the idea that slaughter-free meat production based on lab-grown cells was more sustainable. “We reject the idea of standardizing products... our culture is tied to the land,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Italian food sector does not seem to be suffering much: Italy’s food exports rose by 15% in 2022 to €60.7bn, mostly driven by wine, pasta, fruit and vegetables(Dubois & Sciorilli Borrelli, 2023).
Food industry experts are also cautious about how consumers will respond to meat grown in laboratories, with some executives concerned they might be put off by it, since "Humans don't eat technology. The investment community might be excited by innovation, but, when it comes to putting things in their bodies, technology might be a barrier for consumers (Mellentin, 2022). Since time immemorial, humans have thought of "meat" as something natural, an animal that ran around before it was killed and cooked.Consequently, the question for all entrepreneurs in this area is whether consumers can swallow the idea of cultivated meat. Many of us already consume ultra-processed or modified foods that could be considered "unnatural", such as packet soups, reconstituted meat products or sweets like bubblegum. If you look at how our attitudes towards food have already changed, they are clearly grounded in culture more than nature.
Half a century ago, it was assumed that it made sense to use as much science as possible in food. In the 1950s, some considered white bread and other processed foods to be superior to the unrefined variants.
Later, frozen ready meals were seen as sophisticated. Indeed, when scientists created genetically modified crops, this was hailed by many as a brilliant "green revolution", since it promised to raise agricultural yields.
Then came the backlash. Since the turn of the century, a trend for more natural, organic food has grown, with consumer protests in Europe against GM food. More recently, vegetarian and vegan diets have become popular, not just due to health and animal welfare concerns, but also because scientists have noted the contribution of livestock to global carbon emissions (Tett, 2020).
Admittedly, it won't be easy for some consumers to undergo those changes, particularly if they've spent the past decade buying organic. However, attitudes are shifting. We now have a generation of consumers who have grown up with technology infusing all areas of their life and younger generations especially are concerned about how the foods they eat contribute to climate change (Krieger, 2020).
The key point is this: given that our attitudes towards food have already fluctuated in the past half-century, there is no reason to think they will not alter significantly again. What seems utterly weird one day has a strange habit of becoming so normal that we never notice how our cultural assumptions have changed.
The farmers challenging the EU's green agenda
Chicken, for instance, has a high environmental impact. It is the world's top meat by production after pork, with about 69bn birds slaughtered a year, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The birds consume large amounts of feed – of which soybeans is a leading component – and environmental campaigners point to growing chicken consumption as a key factor behind Amazon deforestation.
A possible solution could be to cultivate meat and seafood, which will help feed more people with a smaller environmental impact, since it should use less land and reduce air pollution. However, for the time being, the facilities that produce cultivated meat use a lot of energy. Opting for renewable energy could shrink cultivated meat's carbon footprint further.
Nonetheless, if alternative proteins are not successful, the Paris climate agreement goals are probably impossible to meet (Friedrich, 2023). In fact, beef and dairy cattle, along with other farm animals, are a major source of methane (a greenhouse gas).
In this connection, the EU argues that the agriculture sector is badly in need of environmental reforms. One senior EU official working on climate policy talks about it as their "problem child".
The sector accounts for 11% of the bloc's total greenhouse gas emissions – a proportion almost as high as it was 20 years ago. Nitrous oxides contained in fertilizer, as well as animal urine and excrement, are a significant part of the problem, with heavy nitrogen concentrations encouraging invasive species to swamp other plants, leading to the loss of biodiversity (Bounds, Hancock, & Varvitsioti, 2023).
Still, the sector is very hard to regulate, mostly because the EU's 9.1mn farms vary in type and scale, running from industrial concerns with thousands of "livestock units" – the measure for farm animals – to smallholders with a handful of vines and a few goats.
The watershed for many farmers came after Russia’sinvasion of Ukraine, right as the commission divulged the Farm to Fork targets. Almost overnight, says a senior commission official, "the debate has changed”. Nowadays, the EU's farmland is becoming a new battlefield over its green ambitions. Nervous governments are scaling back the commission's proposals, under pressure from an organized, well-funded farming lobby with close links to politicians. The increasing resistance poses a major challenge to the EU's goal to cut emissions by 55% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels, in line with its international commitments. If Brussels cannot bring farmers on board, its pledge to hit net zero emissions by 2050 may be at risk (European Union, 2023).
Some argue that the bloc's proposals are not suitable for a "wartime economy", in which farmers should be freed to produce (Lambert, 2023). Contrariwise, EU policymakers claim that the measures are in the interests of farmers in the long run, viewing the fact that the increase in gas prices has driven up the cost of fertilizers and chemicals. Decades of intensive farming have leached nutrients from the soil so more has to be used to achieve the same output.
Despite the backlash, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has not slowed the pace of policymaking since the Ukraine war started. The commission is convinced that the transition to a resilient and sustainable agricultural sector, in line with the European green deal and its Farm to Fork and biodiversity strategies, is fundamental to food security. Besides, Brussels has made some changes since the war in Ukraine started. It has allowed farmers to plant animal feed crops on the 10% of the land that has to be left uncultivated to recover, a condition of getting subsidies. It also suspended rules requiring the rotation of crops (Mamer, 2023).
Anyway, it is national governments that have slammed the brakes on. European Commission proposals can be amended by each one of the member states and, one by one, they have reduced its ambition.
In January, some 16 EU agriculture ministers signed a letter to Brussels complaining that the policies could lead to the "abandonment of agricultural and forestry land in the union".
"It's a myth to say either you have more nature or you have more food," argues one EU official. "The major fundamental threats to food security include climate change and biodiversity loss."
What is very important is to understand that those environmental proposals never go against the farm. They are for farms, because, without nature, farming is not possible. It is a significant change for our farmers, but inevitably they will have to be part of the solution(Sinkevicius, 2023).
Bibliography
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