More than a century ago, Congress put the USDA in charge of meat safety, including regulation of slaughterhouses and packing plants. A rider on the USDA-FDA funding bill for fiscal 2019, scheduled for a House Appropriations Committee vote on Wednesday, would expand the USDA’s food safety portfolio to cover lab-grown meat, variously called clean meat by proponents and fake meat by ranchers.
First unveiled in 2013, lab-grown meat is still in the developmental stage, although the executives of at least one company hope to have some products ready for the restaurant trade before the end of the year. Two large U.S. meat processors, Tyson Foods and Cargill, have invested in Memphis Meats, the San Francisco Bay-area company that is developing technology to grow meat from self-reproducing cells.
The USDA-FDA rider, Section 736, resolves two questions: Should the government regulate cellular agriculture and if so, whether the FDA or USDA should be in charge. The FDA oversees the bulk of the U.S. food supply and has jurisdiction over genetically engineered animals such as AquaBounty’s GMO salmon. The USDA has overseen meat safety since passage of a 1906 law enacted as a result of muckraking exposes of the meat industry.
Under Section 736, the USDA would “regulate products made from cells of amenable species of livestock…grown under controlled conditions for human food and shall issue regulations prescribing the type and frequency of inspection required for the manufacture and processing of such products, as well as requirements necessary to prevent the adulteration and misbranding of these products.”
Ranchers are united in trying to pre-empt lab-grown meat from being sold as meat, although they disagree on how to do it. The USDA should use its pre-approval power over labels “to prevent misleading marketing labels such as ‘clean meat,'” says the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which urged the USDA to assert primacy over the FDA in regulating the goods. “NCBA firmly believes the term beef should only be applicable to products derived from actual livestock raised by farmers and ranchers.” The smaller U.S. Cattlemen’s Association petitioned USDA in February to write a labeling standard that limits “beef” to products “from cattle that have been born, raised and harvested in the traditional manner.”
The meat industry wants to prevent meat from becoming a generic term like milk has become with the advent of soy milk or almond milk despite the dairy industry’s attempts to restrict the word to milk from livestock. “Clean meat” proponents say their products don’t require livestock slaughter and use less land and water than feedlots and produce fewer greenhouse gases.
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro requested a comprehensive review of existing regulation of cellular agriculture and what regulatory framework would be appropriate. “More information is needed for Congress to address this emerging sector in the United States and to ensure it is properly overseen by the relevant agencies once these products are commercially available,” wrote DeLauro to the Government Accountability Office, a congressional agency, in March.
The nonprofit Good Food Institute hopes Section 736 will be removed from the USDA-FDA bill, reported Science magazine. “It is wrong for Congress to use a spending bill to mandate that agencies create unnecessary new regulations and, even worse, to do so without any input from the small businesses that are being regulated,” said an official from the institute, which supports plant-based proteins and lab meat.
“The USDA has a dual role of promoting and regulating agriculture, and newer food-technology companies fear long-tenured interest (groups) have enough political clout within the agency to make it a lot harder for them to get high-tech meat to market,” said Quartz.