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Efforts by Republican lawmakers in the US to ban lab-grown meat are an “own goal” that will give Asia a competitive advantage, just like in semiconductors, according to one of the few manufacturers with an approved product.
A bill signed this month by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that criminalizes the production and sale of lab-grown meat, a form of edible protein grown from animal cells, is a ploy The US election will spark a “culture war”, but one that risks giving away commercial benefits, said George Peppou, chief executive of Australian start-up Vow.
“It is surprising to see elected officials scoring their own goal. . . Instead of letting the market decide,” Peppou said, adding: “Especially given what we have seen in industries like semiconductors, where the ceding of a key technological advantage to Asia has now put the US in a really precarious national security situation .”
The ban was “nothing but politics,” he said. “It appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to create an enemy where there is none and start a culture war.”
Vow last month received approval to sell cultured Japanese quail meat in Singapore, which became the first country to allow the sale of lab-grown meat in 2020. His product is marketed as a luxury item in expensive restaurants.
Two larger competitors, Eat Just and Upside Foods, have previously sold lab-grown chicken that received federal approval as safe for consumption in the U.S. last year.
Alabama recently became the second U.S. state, after Florida, to ban cultured meat, while Republicans in at least five other states have passed laws banning the sale or distribution of lab-grown meat since the start of the year.
“Take your fake lab meat elsewhere,” DeSantis said as he signed the state ban. “We don’t do that at the state of Florida.”
DeSantis portrays lab-grown meat as a conspiracy by the “global elite,” Peppou said, adding that there were never “substantial concerns about safety.”
Proponents of cultured meat argue that the industry can help meet growing protein needs as the global population swells to 10 billion in the coming decades and diets in developing countries change, while limiting the environmental impact of meat production. Livestock farming is currently responsible for around a sixth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Peppou said he was “surprised that Republicans in the United States are acting against the free market economy that has really driven U.S. prosperity for so long.”
“Cultivated meat, like semiconductors, is a technology that has its origins in public sector research in the United States. . . The vast majority of private capital flows into this company and the companies that are both best capitalized and first to market are all in the US,” he said.
In the case of semiconductors, however, the advantage was “ultimately ceded to Asia for a whole range of political reasons,” Peppou said. The same risk exists with lab-grown meat.
For Singapore, a small city-state that imports most of its food, cultivated protein alternatives are part of its food security strategy.
Peppou says this mindset is increasingly being adopted across Asia, including China. “We are starting to see cultured meat appear in China’s five-year plans,” he said, with “political echoes across countries in Asia, while the U.S. is going the opposite way.”
“It seems inevitable that this will then be a technology that will be available in some parts of the world and not in the United States.”