YOU DON’T TYPICALLY find philosophical bickering at an FDA public meeting. But then again, this was no ordinary public meeting. On Thursday, the agency convened a scrum on so-called cultured meat—animal tissue, grown in a lab, derived from just a handful of cells taken from a cow or chicken or fish. Experts, lab meat companies, and spokespeople from industry groups discussed the technology, and regulation, and safety, which all seemed to boil down to one weirdly complicated question: What is meat anyway?
There were the consumer groups, specifically the Consumers Union, which advocated for more transparency: “It's important that the name informs consumers that the food is different from conventional meat, and gives consumers some idea of how it was produced.”
Even the dairy folks got in on it. The National Milk Producers Federation compared lab-grown meat to the scourge of soy milk, which they see as “a rampant abuse of standardized dairy terms.” What then, should standardized meat terms be? “Our definition of meat or beef should pertain exclusively to a protein food product that was harvested from the flesh of an animal in a traditional manner,” Lia Biondo, spokesperson for the US Cattlemen's Association, tells WIRED.
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