JACKSON HOLE, WYO – Should companies that ‘grow’ tissue samples from a cow in a lab be able to market that product as ‘meat?’
It’s already happening, and at least one state lawmaker wants to make sure Wyoming is prepared to defend its homegrown steaks and burgers as “100% on the hoof” and label manufactured meat as “imitation food.”
Sen. Wyatt Agar has sponsored a bill currently in the Agriculture committee that tackles head-on a growing trend by food producers to build edible products like meatballs and fish fillets in a laboratory out of animal cells. The end product might be considered biologically identical to a cow or a fish, but it would have never been alive.
Companies like Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat, and Finless Food are among companies that are almost ready to market their products. The USDA and FDA are in a joint process of figuring out how they will address cell-cultured food products.
Meanwhile, other companies that sell veggie burgers, for example, sometimes label their products as ‘meat.’
Agar said he wants to get ahead of the curve with a state law that would make it a crime in Wyoming to label biological beef as meat.
Senate File 68 would: “Represent a product as meat in labeling, advertising or other sales promotion unless the product is derived from harvested livestock, poultry or exotic livestock as those terms are defined [currently in state statute]. Meatlike product that is not derived from harvested livestock, poultry or exotic livestock as those terms are defined in [state statute], shall clearly label the product as an ‘imitation food.’”
The Senate File goes on to define meat as “the edible part of the muscle of animals, which is skeletal or which is found in the tongue, in the diaphragm, in the heart or in the esophagus, with or without the accompanying or overlying fat, and the portions of bone, skin, sinew, nerve and blood vessels which normally accompany the muscle tissue and which are not separated from it in the process of dressing, but shall not include the muscle found in the lips, snout or ears, nor any edible part of the muscle which has been manufactured, cured, smoked, cooked or processed.”
Legislatures in Nebraska, Tennessee, and Virginia are also considering similar laws that clearly define what they consider meat. Missouri has already enacted its own law decrying ‘lab loins.’
