Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage

I roughly checked the french press (I don't read italian): there is no account of the "food heritage" argument, but I wouldn't be surprised if the right did put forth the argument.

So when I hear "soandso European is far-right!" then shouldn't I be forgiven for thinking, "well, then it's no big deal."

If Mussolini III is indeed to the left of Joe Biden (as they keep telling me over and over and over and over and over) then...nothing to worry about, right?

Ah yeah the left never takes lobby money. If you want to make a point, try not to make your bias so clear.

I'm not a EU expert, but I think freedom of movement means you can't ban based on country of origin, not that you can't ban a product generally.

If alcohol was to be banned today, we'll probably see protests and black markets appearing very quickly. But if alcohol was just invented yesterday and today a ban is implemented, the reaction would be much smaller.

In that view, it makes sense to ban as early as possible, when the ban as the least amount of effect and used as prevention, rather than to hammer down something that is already large.

But again, I think the whole ban is stupid, just trying to understand why it'd be implemented so early.

This is just another example of an old but still powerful industry attacking what it perceives as a threat. The same sort of thing happened to absinthe in France, and that campaign was so successful absinthe became taboo for over a century.

why should GMOs and Monsanto, which has now been taken over and is one of the lesser producers, be banned? and why do we always have to make ourselves known with our mediocrity of repeated bar ideas, dear fellow Italian?

Until then, everything will slowly fail as it is happening already.

So yes, you are indeed right.

-- an emigrated Italian.

Don't put this on "the people" who can barely do much if the whole system is undermined by their leadership for decades.

Poland had and still having an huge financial support from UE as well.

in recent months the issues have been banning rave parties, banning documents for children of lgbt couples and war on cricket flour

Conservative national-chauvinist gov't enacts national-chauvinist legislation.

It's "throwing red meat to your base" ... except actually literally, not metaphorically.

> Indeed it’s hard to imagine that people who survived the second world war eating chestnuts, as my grandfather did, would be concerned about using pork jowl instead of pork belly in a pasta recipe. Or as Grandi puts it, “Their ‘tradition’ was trying not to starve.”

I think it's wise to remember that for most of history the majority of people have been too poor to be picky.

https://youtu.be/Di55DEnNkUs

> like forcing us to eat worms instead of pasta

Nobody is "forcing" you to anything. That's misrepresenting reality to a degree that's not even funny had you used /s tags.

That's basically escargot, right?

- A scarcity based mindset would argue that more life is inherently bad, see Malthus.

- A longtermist would argue that more life at any cost is better because it increases the statistical likelihood that some good would happen even as it increases the scope of potential catastrophe.

- An existentialist would argue that a life of captivity, born to die with no right to self-determination is not a life worth living

- Socrates would likely argue it doesn't matter because the chickens and the cows won't examine their life to extract any meaning at all

- Utilitarians would say people are getting fed either way, so go for the most efficient means.

- etc etc

This is a question of subjective valuation, and as such will never have a definite answer. It will also be subject to whatever framework the reader subscribes to.

The questions surrounding environmental impact, scale, food pipeline stability, et al are more measurable and able to deliver a quantitative "better or worse" conclusion given sufficient framing. To my mind that makes them more interesting.

For the life of me, I cannot understand what is there to protect about killing other living beings for joy or taste.

Doing something shitty for a long time doesn't affect how bad it is, just how hard it will be to stop.

Intersting take.

Where does that sound come from?

I worked for a lab grown meat company and the CEO would give "Lab Grown Foie gras" to the media and investors, that was actually Foie gras. They could feel good about climate change, and he would take your money. Have you ever looked into the inefficiency of a bioreactor? Probably not.

Also, that's not even the worse of the things introduced by our government yesterday, administrations do not need to publish a public contract for works up to 150k euros.

Now every single administration can spend and gift corrupted money left and right without any need for any accountability and rules.

Disgusting.

We need to fully understand its safety, nutritional content, and long-term health effects.

Our understanding of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets is still limited. Therefore, it's important to ensure that lab-grown meat adequately replicates the complex array of nutrients and other beneficial compounds found in conventionally produced meat.

Long-term effects: Since lab-grown meat is a relatively new technology, the long-term health effects of consuming it are not yet known. Rigorous safety testing and research are needed to establish its safety over time.

---------------

Modern nutrition is largely unexplored territory

"The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet" December 2019 Nature Food

DOI:10.1038/s43016-019-0005-1

"Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components that are tracked and catalogued by the United States Department of Agriculture and other national databases. Although this knowledge has been transformative for health sciences, helping unveil the role of calories, sugar, fat, vitamins and other nutritional factors in the emergence of common diseases, these nutritional components represent only a small fraction of the more than 26,000 distinct, definable biochemicals present in our food—many of which have documented effects on health but remain unquantified in any systematic fashion across different individual foods. Using new advances such as machine learning, a high-resolution library of these biochemicals could enable the systematic study of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets, opening new avenues for understanding the composition of what we eat, and how it affects health and disease."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337846288_The_unmap...

Proposing ridiculous laws that won’t go anywhere is an age-old tactic for local politicians to grab headlines and fire up their voter base. There are numerous proposed laws like that every week that will never go anywhere and were never intended to.

Ridiculous, yes, but don’t let it fool you into thinking that there was a chance of it happening in the US.

As for Italy: I have no idea. Their politics are weirder than I can wrap my head around and I’m not familiar enough to know if this is a political bluff or a serious effort.

It is a bit of an open question as to whether or not chemical engineers can beat a chicken in a chicken making contest, but should the results come back unequivocally in favor of the chemists, then Italy can simply repeal the law.

I am not for any top down laws banning things, but the idea that lab grown is anywhere an equal swap for real meat is silly. Italy has a genuine concern, they value food, and that comes down to the quality of ingredients.

> "Food or feed consisting of, isolated or produced from cell cultures or from tissues deriving from vertebrate animals is therefore completely prohibited for the use in the preparation of food, drink and feed."

Hence, you can make lab-grown meat from various insects (or crab or lobster) if you like with no concerns. Not sure if the public has an appetite for it, but these are apparently delicious when deep-fried:

https://www.mysabah.com/wordpress/sago-worm-butod/

I think lobster is the way to go. I guess octopus cells would also be an acceptable starting material (octopi are intelligent and shouldn't be hunted IMO).

Con:

Producing and consuming lab-grown human meat raises ethical questions about human dignity and the potential normalization of cannibalism, even if it does not involve harming an actual person.

Many religious and cultural beliefs would likely oppose the production and consumption of lab-grown human meat.

The long-term health effects of consuming lab-grown human meat are unknown, and the production process would need to be carefully regulated to ensure safety.

The idea of consuming human meat, even if lab-grown, is likely to be met with strong social disapproval and stigma, which could hinder its acceptance.

The production and consumption of lab-grown human meat could face legal challenges in many jurisdictions, as it might be considered a form of cannibalism or be subject to other regulations.

Pro:

Some individuals may be interested in trying lab-grown human meat due to curiosity or as a novel experience, without causing harm to another person.

Cultivating human tissue in a lab could have applications in medical research, such as testing drug efficacy, studying human tissue regeneration, or using it for transplantation purposes.

imho: lab-grown meat not only a scientific issue.

Is it not equally ridiculous to ban combustion engine sales?

It appears many want the government to “protect them from carbon”. Why is it bad for people to want to protect the robustness of their food supply?

If you view government as a way to protect the population (as it seems most here do), then it shouldn’t be surprising people use it to protect themselves.

Personally, I think a fair market where regulation is as minimal as possible is best. That said, I wouldn’t want a few corporations controlling my countries food supply. So, please keep the farms active and plentiful.

Similarly, I wouldn’t want car manufacturers of EV to receive any government benefit. Let’s see it produced and become dominate. As oil prices rise because it becomes a scarce resource, EVs would become popular. Of course, we haven’t actually seen a decline in oil production where that occurs, so we do it artificially.

Sadly, it's not. It requires growing tumors based on animal cells, which need to be pumped full of antibiotics to prevent infection, because a clump of cells has no immune system.

The EU is extremely skeptic of any genetically-modified food, for a whole load of various reasons, and banning lab-grown meat is entirely in line with that. If you can't tolerate one extra disease-resistance gene in your food, you're not going to be happy with lab-grown meat either.

Furthermore, the EU has a very long list of foods that are only allowed to be grown in specific areas or in certain ways. While this is nominally because a lot of those foods are named after specific towns, in practice many of them do not have "generic" names, so these are ultimately de-facto trade bans on other people making those foods. Labs being able to grow "perfect" versions of those foods (as opposed to the generic competition being demonstrably worse) would upend this system.

I'm calling Bs on the whole cow industry being bad for the planet because of their bodily functions. Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet.

There is more resource consumption and harm in transferring the livestock as meat and farming livestock than there is in the methane gas. And lab grown meat is not going to change that.

You the city people are so cocky in teaching me the village guy about how to live the life.

What if I do not want my meat addiction to be controlled by some big corps? For example, they may decide to put in their meat products something I do not want to be put. At least I can grow my food as I like it to be grown and I can kill it in the way I find reasonable (for example, I might like some products from blood and I might use a lot of animal fat). And last but not least, different parts of animal body has totally different taste which might be hard to simulate - that's why I'm sure that nothing will force me to stop holding cattle before end of my life.

We can insist on ignoring the problems for as long as possible but that's still not forever. Eventually we will have to start paying the "real price", which would mean that meat gets a lot more expensive, as it used to be a few hundred years ago. But people will not like paying 3x for meat. They will have to eat less of it or look for alternatives, including insect-based foods. Such alternatives shouldn't be blanket-banned without good reason. (Not that I believe lab mean will be cheaper than animal meat any time soon)