Synthetic meat, the bill in the classroom today. Senator Cattaneo: «No to preventative bans»
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The Senate discussion of the bill banning the production and placing on the market of synthetic food and feed will begin on Tuesday 18 July. The provision, strongly backed by the government majority and also supported by many of the farmers’ and breeders’ associations, aims to prohibit in advance any food produced from cell cultures in Italy even before any authorization by the European Commission.
Already marketed in the USA, in Israel and in some Asian countries, the so-called synthetic meat has not yet landed on European tables: to date, EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, has in fact not yet received any request for authorization for the placing on the market of products derived from the cultivation of animal cells in the laboratory. However, research is also going on in the Old Continent, and the Italian academic world itself is questioning itself. The same Senate today, in view of the discussion of the bill, is hosting a conference entitled “Innovation at the table: studying is better than prohibiting”, where some professors from the Universities of Trento, Pisa, Milan, Rome and Parma will illustrate the state of scientific art about stem cells and cultured meat.
The senator for life will pull the strings of the conference Elena Cattaneo, internationally renowned scientist and researcher in the field of stem cells. Who gave an exclusive interview on the subject to Il Sole 24 Ore.
As a country and as consumers, should we fear research into lab-grown meat?
The objective of research is to get to know a phenomenon or an innovation to the best of our ability in order to understand its consequences and effects. Making decisions based on scientific evidence should be the norm. For cultivated meat, and not only, in Italy, another path has been decided: the ideological one of the ban regardless of the data that is being put together, and to which our universities are also contributing, I am thinking of those of Trento and Tor Vergata. Rather, we should be afraid of a government choice which, lightly, boasts of making our country the first in the world to “a priori” ban all kinds of cultivated meat, mortifying our researchers and cutting off our companies from the global competition for innovative investments. Furthermore, if and when EFSA were to give its “nulla osta”, Italy would become a mere consumer of a technology produced elsewhere.
In which countries is research further ahead? Are the regulations that these countries have given themselves adequate to protect the health of consumers?
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