The Anti-Cultivated Meat Coalition in the EU

Since it was introduced to the world in 2013, cultivated meat has been welcomed as a revolutionary way to produce proteins without having a negative impact on the environment. Governments worldwide jumped at the opportunity. At the end of 2020, Singapore was the first country to approve it. The U.S. followed in 2023, Israel in 2024, and Australia is probably next in line. In the meantime, in the EU — in spite of the millions of Euros invested to advance research on this novel food — a vocal opposition is forming.

The first signs date back to 2021, when the French Parliament approved a law that prohibited canteens of schools, universities, hospitals and penitentiary institutions from including cultivated meat on the menu. While that initiative went almost unnoticed outside of France, what caused a sensation in 2023 was the total ban by the Italian government, which prohibited the sale, import and production of cultivated meat. A few months later, the French and Romanian Parliaments introduced similar bills, whose final approval is still pending.

From the outside, those bans (or attempts thereof) look like an overreaction, considering that they could be sanctioned for breaching the EU’s common market rules, and that cultivated meat is not authorized for sale in the EU anyway — and isn’t likely be for at least a few years.

For the opponents of cultivated meat, however, the matter is terribly serious. In 2023, the Economic Affairs Committee of the French Senate released a report stating that cultivated foods are not “a desirable food model,” and reiterating “its anthropological, ethical, cultural and, in short, political opposition to the development of cellular foods.” The report rejects the “purely utilitarian vision of food” behind cultivated meat, in the name of food “first and foremost as a cultural and social fact.”

As Rebecca Wells, Ph.D., senior lecturer at the Center for Food Policy at City, University of London, explained, “These reactions take the idea of cultivated meat to its logical conclusion, that we wouldn’t need farmed livestock anymore. And while that has gained the support of animal welfare groups, it’s also seen as a massive threat to the jobs and livelihoods of those who’ve been farming animals for generations, and also to the whole culture around meat production and consumption. In countries like Italy and France, farming organizations are quite strong and are therefore making a stand as early as possible to try to prevent any approval in the future.”

Who is part of the anti-cultivated meat front and what’s really at stake for them became clear during a meeting of EU agriculture and fisheries ministers in January this year, when the Austrian, French and Italian delegations released a note with the support of Hungary, Romania and seven other smaller EU countries. The document says that “cultivated food production […] raises many questions [that] are essential for the future society that we want to build in Europe.”

Unlike the report by French senators, who stated their opposition loud and clear, this note aims to generate a “renewed and broad debate in the EU specific to lab-grown meat.” In fact, what this coalition of 12 countries produced is a rhetorical exercise. Two of them have already banned cultivated meat and others are trying to do it or considering doing it. For them, the debate is clearly already over.

The fact that for some Member States there should even be a debate around a food product is a complete novelty for the EU. According to European laws, before it’s approved for sale, a new food must pass the safety assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). EFSA has no power to approve or ban foods; that’s for the European Commission (EC) to do. But the EC so far has always followed EFSA’s conclusions.

To some extent, this is a political clash between right wing opposers on one side, ready to defend traditions and farmers’ interests no matter what, and left-wing supporters with an environmental agenda on the other. But Wells warned that with cultivated meat, positions are less clear-cut: “I think there’s a tension that transcends party politics in a way. Between left and right there is a gray area, with smaller farming groups and groups such as Slow Food or alternative food networks, which might align more closely with green and environmental protection values, but still want to protect traditional farming methods.”

To see how this ends, we may have to wait at least until 2028. EFSA’s safety review of a novel food can take up to four years, and for cultivated meat it hasn’t even started yet, although a company has initiated the pre-submission process.

If cultivated meat is approved for sale, there will be more problems to solve for policymakers, said Wells: “How to label it and in what aisle of the supermarket to put it is something that will take a long time and policymaking to resolve. The solutions will depend on the answer to one of the main questions around cultivated meat: is it a type of meat or is it a completely novel food?”