Strong opposition in Italy
Seven out of ten Italians (70%) are against the marketing of artificial food produced in laboratories, from chicken to beef, due to concerns about the long-term effects on human health and the environment. This is what emerges from the Coldiretti/Censis investigation in reference to the decision of the Israeli Ministry of Health to approve the sale to the public of artificial meat from bovine cells.
What's happening in the USA
A decision that follows the authorizations granted for artificial chicken meat by Singapore and the United States where the green light had been given by the FDA, to the Californian startup Upside Food. An operation which at the end of December 2023, the technological magazine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston included among the biggest scientific failures of the year since, despite the green light for marketing obtained from the US authorities, there would still be no trace of laboratory products in supermarkets and large-scale production would be more problematic than expected. In particular, various journalistic investigations, starting from those of the Wall Street Journal, highlighted that Upside Food used a lot of manpower, plastic and energy to produce very few chicken filaments.
The doubts of European countries
Mistrust has also spread in Europe after the approval of the Italian law which introduced a ban on the production and marketing of cell-based foods for food use or animal feed in compliance with the precautionary principle and awaiting scientific results of public research independent to avoid using men as guinea pigs. In fact, doubts have been expressed in Austria and France where the bill "to ban the production, processing and marketing of synthetic meat throughout the national territory" was submitted to parliament, in the interests of human health, the health of animals and the environment on the initiative of a group of parliamentarians from the French National Assembly, belonging to the Les Républicains party, which is part of the new Government (source: Coldiretti).