Allowing Slaughter-Free Meat: Federal regulation is hindering the development of food from cell culture technology.

• Author: Lutter, Randall

Animal cell culture technology--a process to make food from cultured animal cells--has the potential to address some consumers' ethical concerns about eating meat, poultry, and fish by providing slaughter-free alternatives. It might also reduce the environmental footprint of conventional agriculture and fishing by devoting resources to growing only tissues that people value highly and not less useful items like hides, hooves, and horns. But whether these potential benefits are ever realized depends largely on how and whether Congress or the White House prunes back the thicket of regulatory obstacles blocking these products' path to market.

A TALE OF TWO REGULATORY AGENCIES

Last November, the Food and Drug Administration claimed in an official statement that it "spurs innovation" for food using cell culture technology. That assessment seems more than a bit premature. The statement followed a 13-month FDA "consultation" with UPSIDE Foods of Berkeley, CA, about the firm's process to make food from cultured chicken cells. The FDA said it had "no further questions at this time about the firm's safety conclusions," hardly a final green light. Additionally, the FDA noted that UPSIDE still needs to meet U.S. Department of Agriculture requirements for the new technology.

Regulation of new food products is often complicated because federal statutes authorizing the FDA and USDA to regulate food do not directly address the regulation of products made with new technologies. So federal agencies commonly develop and assert their preferred interpretation of preexisting statutes. Policies developed in this way exist for food made from genetically engineered food, gene-edited plants, and now food made through cell culture technology.

In 2019 the FDA and the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) signed an agreement to "jointly oversee" the production of food derived from the cells of livestock and poultry. Such joint oversight is highly unusual if not completely unprecedented and erects costly and unnecessary barriers to cell culture technology's path to market.

The longstanding practice is for the USDA-FSIS to regulate specific food products identified in federal statutes and for the FDA to regulate everything else. For instance, the USDA-FSIS regulates meat products from named livestock (cattle, sheep, swine, and goats), poultry products, and egg products because Congress expressly assigned those to it. The FDA, meanwhile, has authority over eggs in shells. The FDA regulates all seafood and fish, except for catfish (Siluriformes), an exception that Congress assigned to the USDA-FSIS in the 2008 Farm Bill. Congress specified conditions for the USDA to regulate pizzas containing USDA-regulated meat or poultry products. Other complications and exceptions exist. For example, for bison and rabbits, the USDA-FSIS has some expertise and offers voluntary inspections but without any supporting statutory authority, while the FDA has authority to conduct inspections.

The 2019 agreement on cell-cultured food products, however, is a completely different soup: an agreement between regulatory agencies to "jointly oversee" production of a category of food products.

One federal agency should be enough to regulate the safety of identifiable products. This principle is necessary for effective White House and congressional accountability and oversight because it makes clear which agency should be called to account if food is found...