Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World

by Paul Shapiro

In Europe, the government exerts much more control over such designations. The European Commission (EC) publishes a list of “Novel Foods,” which it defines as “food that has not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU prior to 1997,” the year in which this regulation took effect. Some of these foods, such as chia seeds and agave syrup, aren’t actually new but were simply not consumed in the EU until recently. Others, meanwhile, are actual products of biotech, such as oils enriched with phytosterols to cut cholesterol. Of the ten categories the EC uses to classify these novel foods, one seems specifically intended to address the issue at hand: “Food consisting of, isolated from, or produced from cell culture or tissue culture derived from animals, plants, microorganisms, fungi, or algae.” Another of the categories includes, “Food consisting of, isolated from, or produced from microorganisms, fungi, or algae.”