Meat is often labeled as being derived from “grass-fed” beef or “free-range” chickens or “dolphin-safe” tuna, or being “antibiotic free”, or so on. Meat from cultured cells is no different.
Red Jungle Fowl, Painting by Barry Kent MacKay
Regarding The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) request
under Docket No. FS-2020-0036 for public response to whether
cultured meat derived from animals subject to the Federal Meat
Inspection Act (FMIA; 21 U.S.C. 601 et. seq.) or the Poultry
Products Inspection Act (PPIA; 21 U.S.C. 451 et. seq.) should be
allowed to be labeled as “meat” on packages or containers sold to
the public.
It absolutely should be in my opinion. In major part I believe this
because it actually is (or will be) meat as meat has always been
defined, as tissue, usually (but not exclusively) muscle tissue
which in turn drives from the division of the appropriate cells. But
there is more to it than that, in that “meat” is, in the English
language, a descriptive, adjectival term, widely used, as in “the
meat of the matter”, or “the red meat base”, meaning a core or
foundational substance, in this case, the product that so often
forms the foundation, or core, of the meal.
I am cognitive, and not dismissive, of the concern that an
inattentive consumer could read the labelling and think that the
product derived from a dead carcass, and not from a culture. But it
is the latter fact that is the selling point of this new product –
that it comes from a source that mitigates the concerns about animal
welfare, the environment and, when appropriate, human health – that
derive from “traditional” meat sources, that being the bodies of
animals. That does not mean it is not meat, however, and it is no
more logical to legislate a distinction that allows the consumer to
know that a product derives from a culture than it does to allow the
consumer to know that a product derives from a corpse.
Either way, I believe it behoves the producer-marketer to clarify in
its own interest the source of the product, as, indeed, already
happens. Meat is often labeled as being derived from “grass-fed”
beef or “free-range” chickens or “dolphin-safe” tuna, or being
“antibiotic free”, or so on. Meat from cultured cells is no
different.
Finally, given the nature of this new product, and its origin, I
think it would be substantively more deceptive to the consumer to
legally mandate that it be labelled as something other than meat.