Chicken meat grown in special reactors has been declared safe to eat for the second time in four months by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on March 22, according to the Agriculture news portal.
According to many industry experts, this is an important step in bringing food grown in fermentation tanks closer to the retail market. “This is food system transformation in action”said Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute, which promotes protein alternatives.
Alternative advocates say that cultured meats, like the plant-based proteins now on the market, are “ruthless and environmentally preferable” replacement of massive livestock farms and slaughterhouses. Representatives of the meat industry, in turn, ridicule competitors for “fake meat”. They argue that the date for the widespread introduction of cell meat in restaurants and shops is unclear, and that alternatives are currently expensive.
However, Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, a large surrogate company, bragged that she “became the first farmed meat company in two countries: the United States and Singapore”. Singapore approved farmed chicken produced by GOOD Meat, a division of Eat Just, two years ago.
The FDA said in a letter to GOOD Meat that its farmed chicken “as safe as comparable products”. The first company to receive the green light from the FDA for cell-cultured meat on November 19, 2022 was UPSIDE Foods, which also produces lab-grown chicken.
The FDA and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) share regulation of cell-cultured meat under a 2019 agreement. The FDA controls the harvesting, growth, and differentiation of the cells. The USDA oversees the gathering, processing, packaging, and labeling of the meat. In the fall of 2021, the USDA said it had no plans to issue new food safety standards for cultured meats, other than rules on how the products would be labeled. The general requirement is that labels must not be false or misleading.
The demand for meat in the United States and the world is growing. However, chicken is the most consumed meat in the United States, with an average of 100.2 pounds (45.5 kg) per person per year.
Source: Rossa Primavera
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