You won’t be finding vegan prosciutto in Italy any time soon. Or any other lab grown meat, for that matter.In a bid to protect its high-value agricultural industry — not to mention its culinary heritage — Italian parliamentarians voted across party lines to overwhelmingly ban any production, sale or import of ‘cultivated’ meat or animal feed by a vote of 159-53.The law bars synthetic foods produced from animal cells without first killing the animal. It also prevents producers from using meat-related terms on packaging labels to describe plant-based proteins such as veggie burgers and steaks. Violators face stiff penalties of up to €60,000 (CAD$90,000).“We are safeguarding our food, our system of nutrition, by maintaining the relationship between food, land and human labour that we have enjoyed for millennia,” Italian agriculture minister, Francesco Lollobrigida, told Italian TV. “Italy is the world’s first country safe from the social and economic risks of synthetic food.”.The only two countries that allow the sale and production of lab-grown meat are the US and Singapore.Critics accused Italy’s conservative prime minister, Giorgio Meloni, of using the country’s Etruscan gastric sensibilities to stoke a culture war over so-called ‘novel foods’ even though agricultural groups demanded protection for the country’s $13 billion meat processing industry.During public debates one of the heads of a farmers union got into fisticuffs with a pair of opposition MPs against the move. It was also considered a rebuke to animal rights groups who have touted synthetic meat as a solution to reduce carbon emissions.That was disputed by a University of California, Davis study that suggested lab grown shanks and roasts could release as much as 25 times more emissions than traditional pastured beef. .Coldrietti, Italy’s largest farmer’s association, urged the ban to protect farmers from multinational corporations at the expense of public health.“We are proud to be the first country that, despite being in favor of research, prevents, as a precautionary measure, the sale of laboratory-produced food whose effects it could have on the health of citizens consumers are currently unknown,” Coldiretti president Ettore Prandini said in a Facebook post.The law still has to be approved by the European Union’s food safety authority — which is notoriously opposed to genetically modified products generally — but the EU’s constitution holds that the “principal of the identities of peoples must be preserved.”
