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Efforts by US republican lawmakers to ban lab-grown meat are an “own goal” that will give Asia a competitive advantage, just as with semiconductors, according to one of the few producers with an approved product.
A bill signed this month by Florida governor Ron DeSantis that criminalises the manufacturing and selling of lab-grown meat, a form of edible protein cultivated from animal cells, is a ploy to create “a culture war” ahead of the US election but one that risks giving away commercial advantage, said George Peppou, chief executive of Australian start-up Vow.
“It’s surprising to see elected officials kicking their own goal . . . rather than letting the market decide,” said Peppou, adding “especially given what we’ve seen in industries like semiconductors where ceding a key technological advantage to Asia has now placed the US in a really precarious national security position.”
The ban was “nothing but politics”, he said. “It seems to be a very thinly veiled attempt at creating an enemy where there isn’t one and at creating a culture war.”
Vow won approval last month to sell cultured Japanese quail meat in Singapore, which in 2020 became the first country to allow the sale of lab-grown meat. Its product is being marketed as a luxury item in expensive restaurants.
Two bigger competitors, Eat Just and Upside Foods, have previously sold lab-grown chicken, which won US federal approval last year as safe to eat.
Following Florida, Alabama recently became the second US state to outlaw cultivated meat while republicans in at least five other states have introduced legislation since the beginning of the year to ban the sale or distribution of lab-grown meat.
“Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere,” DeSantis said when he signed the state ban. “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
DeSantis presents lab-grown meat as a conspiracy by the “global elite”, said Peppou, adding there have never been any “substantive concerns raised on safety”.
Advocates for cultivated meat argue the industry can help meet growing demand for protein as the world’s population expands towards 10bn in coming decades and diets in developing countries change, while limiting the environmental impact of meat production. Livestock currently account for around a sixth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Peppou said he was “surprised to see republicans in the US going against free market economics, which have really driven US prosperity for such a long time”.
“Like semiconductors, cultured meat is a technology which originated out of US public sector research . . . the vast majority of private capital going into it and the companies which are both best capitalised and first to market are all in the US,” he said.
With semiconductors, though, “for a whole bunch of policy reasons, the advantage ended up getting ceded to Asia,” said Peppou. The same risks happening with lab-grown meat.
For Singapore, a small city-state that imports the majority of its food, cultivated protein alternatives are part of its food security strategy.
This way of thinking is increasingly being adopted throughout Asia, including in China, according to Peppou. “We’re starting to see cultured meat pop up in China’s five-year plans”, he said, with “policy echoes throughout countries across Asia, whilst the US is going the other way”.
“It seems inevitable that that’s then going to be a technology which is going to be available to some parts of the world and not in the US.”
