On the agenda of Tuesday’s Council of Ministers is a draft law “with provisions banning the manufacture and placing on the market of synthetic food and feed”. “This law regulates the ban on the manufacture and marketing of synthetic foods,” says the explanatory report of the regulation. And it adds that the ban “encompasses both food for human consumption and feed for animal consumption”.
According to the rumors collected by the AGI, anyone who violates the provisions can be fined “from a minimum of 10,000 euros to a maximum of 60,000 euros or up to 10 percent of the total annual turnover achieved in the last financial year before the “determination of the violation completed year, if this amount exceeds 60,000 euros, in addition to confiscation of the illegal product”.
So-called “synthetic meat” in particular is being targeted. “Among the synthetic foods, research and production is most focused on meat, which is the result of a cell cultivation process carried out in the laboratory on animal stem cells,” is the premise of the draft law. In some non-European countries – according to the draft of the regulation – “studies on the production of such foodstuffs for commercial purposes” are well advanced, and in the United States the go-ahead has come “for the first chicken meat” produced in the laboratory, ie a meat which by the development of animal cells is produced in the laboratory». “The state of research and testing of synthetic foods seems – this is emphasized – to be at an embryonic stage, so that it is not possible, especially scientifically, to rule out that such artificially produced foods do not have negative consequences for human health”.