Synthetic meat in the government’s sights: after the insect meal here is the new battle of Lollobrigida

Behind it is always him, the brother-in-law of Italy and Minister of Agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida. The exponent of Fratelli d’Italia whose main reference is Coldiretti, the powerful trade association of Italian agricultural producers, after the labeling obligation for flours that originate from insects, today in the Council of Ministers will bring a proposal law to block the production and trade in Italy of synthetic food and feed, such as meat: that is, built from animal cells in the laboratory. In America and in various EU countries, research is well under way, in Italy it risks getting stuck.

What is certain is that today the agenda of the Council of Ministers provides for a bill “containing provisions on the subject of the prohibition of the production and placing on the market of food and synthetic feed”. “This law lays down provisions on the prohibition of the production and placing on the market of synthetic foods”, reads the explanatory report of the provision. The text establishes a ban on the production and marketing of synthetic foods: the ban “includes both food intended for human consumption and feed intended for animal consumption”.

Operators who violate the provisions will be subject to a pecuniary administrative sanction “from a minimum of 10,000 euros up to a maximum of 60,000 euros or up to 10 percent of the total annual turnover achieved in the last financial year closed prior to the ascertainment of the violation, when this amount exceeds 60,000 euros, in addition to the confiscation of the illicit product”. “Among the synthetic foods, the one on which research and production has focused the most is meat which is the result of a cell cultivation process carried out in the laboratory on animal stem cells”, the premise of the bill.

In some non-European countries – the draft of the provision underlines – “studies aimed at the production of such foods for commercial purposes” are at an advanced stage and in the United States the go-ahead has arrived “for the first chicken meat produced in a laboratory, i.e. a meat that is produced by developing animal cells in the laboratory”. “The status of the research and experimentation of synthetic foods seems – it is remarked – to be at an embryonic stage, such that one is not in the conditions, above all scientific, to be able to exclude that such artificially produced foods do not have negative consequences for human health”.