Britain has approved the sale of lab-grown meat for pet food, becoming the first European nation to give its blessing to a process that has prompted opposition in other countries.
The move, which became an opportunity for entrepreneurs after Britain’s split from the more-regulated European Union, is a victory for the biotech industry, which the British government hopes to build into a superpower.
The landmark approval went to Meatly, a British company that grows meat from chicken cells for pet food. Its product, which will begin feeding trials in August, arrives at a time when the worldwide market for pet food is expected to grow 5 percent this year to $151 billion, according to the research firm Statista.
And it is more sustainable and kinder to animals, said Owen Ensor, the chief executive of Meatly.
“It allows you to still feed the meat that your pets crave and that you want to feed your pet — while providing all the nutrients that your pet needs,” said Mr. Ensor, who added that he had fed the product to his cats, Lamu and Zanzi.
When it comes to lab-grown meat, Britain is ahead of countries in the European Union primarily because it is no longer beholden to the bloc’s tighter regulations and often slow-moving approval process for technological developments, advocates of alternative proteins said.
“Europe is cutting itself off from innovation,” said Linus Pardoe, the U.K. policy manager at the Good Food Institute Europe, which works to advance technological alternatives to animal proteins. “The U.K. has a much more straightforward system now that we’ve left the European Union.”
That has been wielded as a political win for Brexit fans, said Tom MacMillan, the chair of rural policy and strategy at the Royal Agricultural University, who has studied farmer perceptions of lab-based meat.
“The last government had a bit of an exercise of hunting around for dividends for Brexit,” he said, adding that food regulations were one of the few areas in which Britain and the European Union might be able to diverge.
Britain has also recently stepped up a push to expand its biotech sector, which includes lab-grown meat.
And many of the top British science universities are used to working closely with the country’s biotech companies, Mr. Pardoe said. “The U.K. has got a big scientific brain that it can apply to developing and scaling cultivated meat,” he said.
Advocates said the shift would have climate benefits. Farming is a major source of pollution and requires an enormous amount of water and land use.
“We also need to be considering the environmental impacts of pets,” said Andrew Knight, a veterinary professor affiliated with Murdoch University School of Veterinary Medicine in Australia and an expert on the sustainable pet food sector.
Various studies, he said, show “that a medium-sized dog has a dietary paw print that is equivalent to that of an average person.” In 2020, dogs and cats in the United States consumed an average of 20 percent of all the livestock bred for consumption in the country, according to his research. Globally, dogs and cats ate about 9 percent in 2018.
Entrepreneurs say they can solve what is sometimes called “the animal-lovers paradox” — people love their pets, but do not want a chicken to die in a factory farm to feed them.
“We don’t need to raise or kill any animals,” Mr. Ensor said, laying out the vision for Meatly, which got its cells from a single chicken egg. “Instead of 50 billion chickens a year, it’s one egg, one time, and we’ve created an infinite amount of meat.”
But lab-grown meat and other alternative proteins (along with oat, soy and almond milks) have become a political football in both Europe and the United States.
Italy, a gastronomic tinderbox, banned the sale of cell-cultivated meat last year, as right-wing lawmakers argued that they were protecting the country’s farmers and national heritage. France is trying to police the language around lab-grown meat, banning what it calls “foodstuffs containing vegetable proteins” from being labeled “filet” or “steak,” among others; Austria and Hungary are holding similar debates.
In the United States, lab-grown meat has become a temperature check for both the right and the left. Florida banned the food in May after two California companies received approval to start selling their meat last year.
Britain, notably, has not yet approved the meat for human consumption.
That’s partly because of regulatory challenges — and partly because it may not pass a national ick-test: A study in 2022 by the University of Winchester found that about 40 percent of meat-eaters would be willing to try cultivated meat. But about 81 percent of them would feed it to their pets.
To Meatly, that’s good news for its product. “Pet food allows us to sidestep some of those issues,” Mr. Ensor said.
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