Italy's right-wing government has backed a bill that would ban laboratory-produced meat and other synthetic foods, highlighting Italian food heritage and health protection.
If the proposals go through, breaking the ban would attract fines of up to €60,000 (£53,000).
Francesco Lollobrigida, who runs the rebranded ministry for agriculture and food sovereignty, spoke of the importance of Italy's food tradition.
The farmers' lobby praised the move.
But it was a blow for some animal welfare groups, which have highlighted lab-made meat as a solution to issues including protecting the environment from carbon emissions and food safety.
[...] The proposals, approved by ministers on Tuesday, seek to ban synthetic foods produced from animal cells without killing the animal, and would apply to lab-produced fish and synthetic milk too.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31, @06:47PM
Real men, and real women, have little problem with eating lambs, cows, pigs, etc. Today's generations are the first humans to be born without incisors and canines in their dental structure. With a few more generations of development, we will start eating the Eloi!!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EJ on Friday March 31, @07:27PM (6 children)
I don't really care where my meat comes from as long as it tastes good (and isn't made of people). I enjoy steak, chicken, pork, etc. just fine, but I'm not stubborn enough to reject a good meal just because it was lab-grown.
I'm perfectly fine with farmers providing me "real" meat, but I also accept that there can be other factors at play. There was mad cow disease. There's bird flu. There are plenty of other issues that can crop up down the road that ravage our meat production ability.
As long as they don't start trying to ban "real" meat, I'll happily allow lab-grown meat to coexist if it is properly labeled as such.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday March 31, @10:51PM
Definitely other factors at play. Be careful before you decide to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes [youtu.be].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by coolgopher on Saturday April 01, @03:55AM
+1 Agree from me. If the flavour is there and they haven't added any New Issues(tm) I'll probably be favouring lab-grown, both on ecological and ethical grounds. If I can get the same thing without killing animals, that seems like a step forward.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday April 01, @05:44AM
I think ham and sausages etc from Italy are a fairly big export. They probably don't want to dilute that with scary lab-ham. It's probably also a trademark thing, like Champagne that isn't from Champagne in France isn't actually Champagne, or can be called Champagne as it's sparkling wine of some kind instead. Same here I would recon a Parma ham has to be from Italy and from an animal from the Parma region in northern Italy, not grown in a vat. They might make the products taste the same, look the same and all that. But for their product needs it's not the same. So there is probably big export money involved here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Saturday April 01, @06:50AM (2 children)
Just a thought: one could possibly mix cells from different animals. You could have a steak that's part cow, part pig, or whatever you fancy.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by EJ on Saturday April 01, @07:00AM (1 child)
Turducken perhaps?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01, @08:08AM
It's Alive!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Friday March 31, @08:19PM
Isn't it a food tradition for cooks to experiment with novel ingredients?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday March 31, @08:54PM (2 children)
Are cows like wine, where only grapes grown in a certain area of France can be made into Champagne? Are certain cows called Turins? Certain goats Naples? I hear Cosenza is really tasty, albeit expensive as the lambs have to be sourced from a small region.
Broadly speaking, a cow is a cow is a cow, a lamb is a lamb is a lamb, a goat is a goat, etc. Yeah, there are exceptions like Waygu beef but those are pretty damned rare.
If fake meat tastes "good enough" and is cheaper than the real thing then Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Let the consumer decide, not some bureaucrat with a (secret) side hustle from the cow industry.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31, @10:05PM
https://www.eater.com/23387706/flannery-beef-meat-holstein-cows-restaurants [eater.com]
It's more about genetics and the way they are raised than location, but if the cell line process can't reproduce it, that's a big difference.
There are other reasons for regulators to go HAM:
https://archive.ph/PMwXz [archive.ph]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01, @02:20AM
Branding and marketing. I actually think it makes sense for Italy to not link itself to lab grown meat and similar.
Italy has a pretty good position in such traditional foods for the wealthy. It's easy to imagine decades from now Italy still selling tons of expensive "DOP" and "IGP"[1] foods to the rich, while China or USA have got dominance on synthetic meat.
In contrast decades from now what are the odds that the Italians would be in a similar position in synthetic meat AND profit more from it than from their traditional stuff now? How many tourists are going to visit Italy to visit their meat vats and sample the produce?
Let others do the synthetic and GMO stuff. There'd still be enough rich people in the world who would pay a premium for that Italian stuff.
[1] https://www.italiandelights.com/blog/dop-or-igp-doc-or-docg-do-you-know-the-difference/ [italiandelights.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Orion Blastar on Saturday April 01, @06:07AM (1 child)
I would not eat a Frankenstein version of meat even if they cloned it. They tried with the Impossible Whopper and failed, they tried with bugs and failed, they even tried soybeans and cereal and other fillers. It just doesn't work. Give me real meat that has a face and a mother.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday April 01, @07:00AM
The path to success is littered with failures. If they can produce something that is chemically identical and has the flavour and texture of other meat I will be happy to eat it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ShovelOperator1 on Saturday April 01, @11:27AM
The ban on lab-grown meat seems strange now, as it is quite expensive, but looks like an useful regulation for the future. I highly doubt government did it intentionally.
Let's look at the PDA market. First, PDAs were expensive like hell. It was literally no reason to have a PDA until you did some large project and could not afford any kg of weight with a portable PC. Finally, the PDA price lowered to portable, and then luggable or even desktop PCs which was quite an interesting entry point and made lots of people buy a PDA.
Then the smartphone revolution came. With it, the Internet stopped to be two side medium and introduced a clear producer-consumer relation, when producer is the multi-million dollar always-innocent company and the consumer consumes mostly ads. Then I decided to stay with an old PDA. Paying for electricity only to watch more brainwashing seems not so feasible to me.
But hey, there were still PDAs, not an ad-stuffing tools. It was still possible to "vote with wallet" and buy a cheap Korean or Chinese things with cloned SH3 CPU (yes, most of these were illegal copies) and some old software running (usually pirated Windows CE).
Finally, it was less and less possible to have a privacy-oriented PDA, which has software working for the user, not for the company which sells them. Now, it can be even seen that many smartphones are sold for price smaller than their parts cost, not including assembly or software, because the rest of the price is taken in form of profiling and user's data. So voting with wallet leads nowhere, as privacy-oriented user has noone to vote for.
The Italian government, intentionally or not, prevented such situation. The same thing as with PDAs may happen when the lab-made meat will get cheaper than traditional meat and it will be manufactured in large-scale reactors. Despite the fact that any problem with such process will lead to massive problems, users will buy because typical consumer will not pay attention for consequences and thinking consumer will have no choice, like currently privacy-oriented user has no choice when getting a PDA.
(Score: 2) by r1348 on Saturday April 01, @01:21PM
Far right government banning what it doesn't understand.