Debate over what is and is not meat heats up

As meat substitute products that use new technologies proliferate and the debate over what is and is not meat heats up, Congress jumped into the fray last week with a paragraph in its proposed USDA budget that would give the agency jurisdiction over products made in labs from animal cells.The House Appropriations Committee released its fiscal year 2019 Agriculture Appropriations bill, which now begins its journey of debate and voting through subcommittee, committee and the full House.  The proposed legislation states: “For fiscal year 2018 and hereafter, the Secretary shall regulate products made from cells of amenable species of livestock, as defined in the Federal Meat Inspection Act, or poultry, as defined in the Poultry Products Inspection act, grown under controlled conditions for use as human food, and shall issue regulations prescribing the type and frequency of inspection required for the manufacture and processing of such products, as well as other requirements necessary to prevent the adulteration and misbranding of these products.”Even as groups representing the cattle industry lobby for these products to not be called “meat,” they have also come out in support of USDA regulating manufacturing facilities that culture products from animal cells.In comments solicited by USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association urged FSIS to “assert jurisdiction over foods consisting of, isolated from or produced from cell culture or tissue culture derived from livestock and poultry animals or their parts.”The topic was also broached at a recent congressional hearing where Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue was asked if USDA had given any thought on the regulation of these products.Perdue replied, “We have. Obviously, there [are] some gray lines between FDA and USDA on many things, but ... meat and poultry has been the sole purview of the USDA. We would expect any product that expects to be labeled as meat would come under that same inspection criteria there.”