The once-sleepy dairy aisle is now an explosion of sustainable, non-dairy plant-based options: milks and yogurts made from coconuts, soy, cashews, almonds, and even pili nuts grown on volcanic rocks. Eggless mayonnaise has gained traction against conventional condiments, and now cell-cultured meats—which don’t require the slaughter of an animal—are close to being ready for the market.
For each of those products, conventional producers in the US—dairy farmers, egg farmers, and cattlemen—have tried to use the federal government as a tool to slow their path to the marketplace. That has most recently been apparent among beef producers, who are keen to throw up roadblocks as companies making cell-cultured meat (also known as “clean meat”) look to make the leap from laboratories to supermarkets and restaurants.
As some people in the food industry have put it, the ways we make and produce our food have never been anchored to static methods; production practices have changed drastically, many times, through the years. The Good Food Institute, which supports and lobbies on behalf of clean-meat companies, says as much in their formal response (pdf) to the petition. “Methods of cattle production today would have been unthinkable to our great-grandparents,” the group writes.
When ranching groups talk about clean meat publicly, they often use pejoratives such as “fake meat,” eliciting visuals of scientists in white lab coats stirring clumps of cells in petri dishes. They seek to transmit a sense that clean meat is a weird technology, so many steps removed from the natural world that people should be concerned. “We forget how close food is to technology,” Lohman says. “Every little thing that we eat has been bred for very specific characteristics.
When ranchers use words such as “traditional” to draw lines of demarcation between their products and clean-meat products, they’re injecting romantic notions about food into the public conversation. That can be dangerous, Lohman says, because romanticizing food is a luxury for people who have access to food and enough money to buy it. It’s easier for those people to ignore food production’s impact on the climate, and the need to feed many more people, most of whom do not have those same luxuries.
Besides, even some of our most ancient foods require very scientific processes for production, Lohman says. “Making bread is science. It’s a point echoed by Uma Valeti, the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Memphis Meats. He says that the ascendance of white bread in America offered a higher-tech, nutrient-fortified version of a food that’s been made for thousands of years, but nobody today disputes whether white bread is, in fact, bread.
And nobody would claim pre-sliced bread—that monolith of human ingenuity—is somehow lesser. “We have a very intimate relationship with food, and food producers have been some of the biggest innovators,” Valeti says. “They are technologists at heart. They have been feeding more and more people with less and less. In that same vein, Memphis Meats on May 2 became the first clean-meat company to formally file a response to the US Cattlemen Association’s petition.
Memphis Meats argues that its product is real meat, and says it wants to work with the government and other stakeholders to find a way to better develop high-protein foods that consumers want. To create an exclusionary definition for meat would only stifle future innovation in meat and poultry production and “encourage a technological standstill at a time when the global need for protein-based foods is on an exponential rise,” the company writes.
Furthermore, Valeti says he thinks the government does not need to create a new regulatory path for high-tech, cell-cultured foods that hope to get to market. Josh Tetrick, the CEO of JUST, another Silicon Valley-based clean-meat company, seems to be aligned with Valeti. “The leaders of the national and global meat industry want to feed the world animal protein in a sustainable way,” Tetrick says.
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