Free Republic

Italy's right-wing government has backed a bill that would ban laboratory-produced meat and other synthetic foods, highlighting Italian food heritage and health protection. If the proposals go through, breaking the ban would attract fines of up to €60,000 (£53,000). Francesco Lollobrigida, who runs the rebranded ministry for agriculture and food sovereignty, spoke of the importance of Italy's food tradition. The farmers' lobby praised the move. But it was a blow for some animal welfare groups, which have highlighted lab-made meat as a solution to issues including protecting the environment from carbon emissions and food safety. Coldiretti and other agriculture lobbies...

Lab-grown meat, touted as the “cruelty-free” food of the future by everyone from the World Economic Forum to Hollywood mega-celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio, may have a fatal problem, according to a new Bloomberg story. The problem is that the materials used to make the product – “immortalized cell lines” – replicate forever, just like cancer. Which means, in effect, that they are cancer. Although these cell lines are widely used in scientific research, they’ve never been used to produce food before. Industry types are “confident” that eating such products poses no risk – although there isn’t any hard data –...

Branson along with Bill Gates, Cargill, and Kimball Musk, backed the Memphis Meats clean-meat startup in its $17 million Series A round, which went on to raise in excess of $22 million. Memphis Meats will join a cadre of sustainable food businesses such as the three Israeli companies — Meat the Future, Future Meat Technologies, and SuperMeat — which will supply food to China as part of a $300 million deal. Branson, who gave up meat in 2014, appears to be investing in alignment with his beliefs and predictions about the future, all while trying to act against the deforestation...