As a handful of companies scale up their operations in anticipation of bringing plant-based meat and other bioengineered foods to market, the question looms of how to fit these 21st-century products into a 20th-century regulatory framework, says Science.
“Historically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulates meat, poultry, and eggs, whereas the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees safety and security for food additives,” writes Science. “FDA also approves so-called biologics, which include products made from human tissues, blood, and cells, and gene therapy techniques. But emerging biotechnologies may blur those lines of oversight, because some of the new foods don’t fit neatly into existing regulatory definitions.”
While they wait for guidance from the federal government, industry leaders are exploring existing options to help streamline the approval of their products. “One approach … is to show that their product is similar to an existing product that testing has already shown to pose no hazards. ‘Most food regulation is about aligning new products with something that’s already recognized as safe,'” says Isha Datar, CEO of New Harvest, a New York City–based nonprofit created to support this new industry.
For instance, Perfect Day, a “startup that’s using yeast to make milk proteins, and then adding other ingredients to create a cow-free ‘milk.'” might take advantage of the fact that “those milk proteins, caseins and whey, are already recognized as safe because they’re identical to the milk proteins we get from cows,” says Datar.
But for many of these products, though, figuring out the regulatory question will not be so simple. Take “cell-cultured meat, in which cells taken from animal muscle are grown on special scaffolds until they form enough tissue strands (about 20,000) to make a meatball or hamburger. It is not quite animal, not exactly a food additive—yet intended as food.”
“‘It’s uncharted territory,’ says Nicole Negowetti, policy director for the Good Food Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that supports cultured and plant-based food alternatives. ‘From my understanding, the USDA regulations are based on food from animal slaughter, so [they don’t] make sense for these products.’”