From Farm to Table, Not Lab to Label: Italy's Ban on Lab-Grown Meat

On Tuesday 30th March 2023, the Italian government released a statement that it had approved a draft law with the aim of banning the use of lab-grown produced food, including lab-grown meat. It claims that the law is needed to ‘safeguard our nation’s heritage’. If this law is passed by the Italian Parliament, the Italian food industry would be fined up to €60,000 (£53,000) for producing food ‘from cell cultures or tissues derived from vertebrate animals’. This post argues that lab-grown meat production, although a subject approached with reservations by many, is a developing industry that is both inevitable and necessary for the ecological health and sustainability of the world.

For the first time in twelve thousand years, a new method has been created that will be able to feed the human race meat, and fundamentally changes how meat is farmed. This method is tissue engineered meat, more popularly known as lab-grown meat. Lab-grown meat is a technique within cellular agriculture that enables us to grow animal cells outside of animals, in a laboratory. The principal ecological advantage of this development would mean that the land currently dominated by animal agriculture could be re-wilded, and that the rate of deforestation and reliance on fertilisers amongst other drivers of climate change and ecological deterioration could be dramatically reduced. It was Winston Churchill who in 1931 stated that in the future ‘we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium’. However, it is only recently that the practical reality of lab-grown meat has really started to take shape. In 2013, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University presented to the world in London the first edible lab-grown beef burger which, somewhat controversially, cost £266,541. The price today is around £7.20 , and by 2030 the production price is predicted to drop to £4 per kg. Lab-grown meat companies now exist all over the world.. Prominent companies in this field include Mosa Meat, Upside Foods, Higher Steaks and Good Meat.

The key driving forces for lab-grown meat are linked to concerns regarding the environment, climate change, food security, animal welfare, and the use of antibiotics in the animal industry. Lab-grown meat could effectively eliminate the need to slaughter animals to create our meat, thereby helping us to mitigate the environmental crisis that the world currently faces. Unfortunately, the environmental crisis is not going to be solved purely by eliminating plastic straws or flying less or, indeed, using lab-grown meat. Responding to it will involve radical change to the way food is produced for the entire global population. As a 2010 report by the United Nations (UN) found, ‘Agriculture and food consumption are identified as one of the most important drivers of environmental pressures, especially habitat change, climate change, water use and toxic emissions’. It has been estimated that 80% of the deforestation in the Amazon is linked to agriculture, which is the result of decades of a laissez-faire attitude to land use which has enabled a foresting of cheap farm acreage. Modern animal agriculture is destroying our natural world, and is an industry that in its current form is not sustainable and desperately needs to be reformed. Mosa Meat claims that lab-grown meat will result in a 99% reduction of land uses, which means such land can be re-wilded and reduce deforestation.

Even though it will likely take years before lab-grown meat appears on supermarket shelves in Europe, the ban on lab-grown meat that the Italian government are currently proposing stymies the development of a response to increasingly unsustainable industry practices which are having marked impacts on global warming. Italy’s cultural heritage and food production remain important considerations, but the adoption of lab-grown meat is necessary to address the global environmental implications of unsustainable food production and consumption. As the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has highlighted: ‘The conventional meat industry promises fewer opportunities for the future, as it already faces a similar fate to the fossil fuel industry’. The lab-grown meat industry is not without its flaws but represents a necessary shift in technology to enable the production of meat in compatibility with the transition towards a more sustainable future. As with any other new industry or technology, there will, of course, be numerous detrimental effects of lab-grown meat. It will be a disrupting industry, which will perhaps even have an unsettling impact for some, but this in itself is not a reason to stop technological innovations that could have such a positive effect on society in regard to the unavoidable issue of climate change. In the words of Animal Equality Italia, Animal Law Italia, Essere Animali, LAV and LNDC Animal Protection: ‘Protecting one sector by hindering or prohibiting the development of another represents a serious limitation of citizens' freedom of choice. Moreover, if a strong global growth of cultivated meat is expected, the current government position is certainly not far-sighted for Italy. Today, science and business offer us a more sustainable alternative to intensive agriculture, but the government seems to want to remain anchored in a system that tastes like the past, inefficient and environmentally unsustainable’. 

Author Information

Scarlett Swain is a full time PhD researcher at Durham Law School, with a specific focus on patents, cellular agriculture, biotechnology, and utilitarianism. She is exploring the developing industry of cellular agriculture, especially in relation to lab grown meat in connection to the wider issue of the rules currently governing ‘patenting nature’ in England and Wales. In addition to this, her research explores the use of the utilitarian perspective as a justification for patents, and the exceedingly important social benefits of environmentalism and sustainability.