The Italian government on Tuesday introduced a draft law that, if approved, would ban the production and sale of cultivated food and meat.
“We are proud to be the first nation in the world to stop this decadence,” said Augusta Montaruli, a lawmaker from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.
Cultivated, or cell-based, meat is created by harvesting cells from live animals, providing them with nutrients to grow in bioreactors and then taking additional steps to turn the cells into a consumer-ready meat product.
Photo: Reuters
The draft law, which would only come into force if approved by both branches of parliament, appears to be a preventive move aimed at signaling the government’s determination in defending Italy’s culinary tradition.
The draft “is based on the precautionary principle, because there are no scientific studies yet on the effects of synthetic foods,” Italian Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci told a news conference. “We want to protect citizens’ health and to safeguard our nation’s heritage and our agrifood culture based on the Mediterranean diet.”
While plant-based proteins are widely available, cultivated meat still has a long way to go before it hits supermarket shelves.
Most start-ups are yet to scale up the technology before they even obtain regulatory approval.
“This development puts Italy at odds with the rest of Europe, where other governments are eager to unlock the benefits of cultivated meat,” said Alice Ravenscroft, head of policy at the Good Food Institute Europe, which represents the alternative protein industry.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema