Italy says no to lab-grown meat

The Italian government has approved a bill to ban the use of laboratoryproduced meat and other synthetic foods, claiming that it will protect its culinary heritage. If passed, anyone producing, exporting or importing food grown from animal cells would face fines of up to €60,000 and risk having their manufacturing plants closed.

“Laboratory products in our opinion do not guarantee quality, wellbeing and the protection of our culture, our tradition,” said minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida.

Italy’s biggest farmers’ association, Coldiretti, supported the idea, in order to protect home production ‘from the attacks of multinational companies’.

The plan, which has to be passed in both houses of parliament, is to ban synthetic foods produced from animal cells without killing the animal, also impacting labproduced fish and synthetic milk too.

However, opposition and animal rights groups have criticised the initiative. “The passing of such a law would shut down the economic potential of this nascent field in Italy, holding back scientific progress and climate mitigation efforts,” said Alice Ravenscroft, head of policy at the Good Food Institute Europe. “Italy is essentially a complete outlier here. It is important to stress that cultivated meat has a lot of potential benefits.”

While anti-vivisection group LAV called it ‘an ideological, anti-scientific crusade against progress’. But the production of cultured meat is still to make a major impact, with Singapore the only country currently allowing the sale of cultivated chicken. It follows Italy’s decision to ban the use of ‘insect flour’ in typical Italian products, such as pizza and pasta (read more in our Flour feature, p26).