Of course, we should all be drinking Soylent and eating pill-based food. Who cares about preserving a tradition of high-level cuisine that exists from time immemorial, when we can live like they did in bad science-fiction books from the 1960s or 1970s instead.
Europe has more stringent food safety requirements than the US...so yes, at least some of the laws are in place for safety reasons.
And who says protecting domestic food sovereignty is a bad thing?
My family is 3 generations of living in plantation housing...on stolen land in Hawaii. A big part of how colonialism works is controlling "the essentials". Food production, water, land rights, information, martial force, etc
It seems like the claim is there is some large consumer demand for these foodish items. If there is, then we can expect a huge black market for these foodish products to emerge in Italy. Policía de Italia better get ready for the deluge...Expect Mama Mia to throw away her heirloom cookbooks for the new meatish craze that's about to sweep through Italy.
The soylent Don will be the most powerful man in the country I tell you...Actually, that could be the real reason behind the ban on the foodish the Italians so desperately crave. Soylent Don wants to corner the market? Your multi-national corporations better make Soylent Don an offer he can't refuse before this gets out of hand...
I'm not necessarily against protecting your local food market, I think there are compelling reasons both for and against it. What I am against is politicians being dishonest about their motivations for imposing laws. If they want to protect your local farmers, they should say so. If the real reason is to protect local farmers, so amount of evidence regarding the safety will be convincing, because it was never about safety. This kind of behavior is detrimental to the public discourse.
I've never claimed there is a large demand, merely that those who wish to consume it should be allowed to, as long as there are no negative effects to the individual or society as a whole of course.
The vast majority of Italian culinary tradition stems from the late 19th century or after that. Dishes like carbonara are from the 50s. Pizza as we know it is from the US and was reintroduced to italy by American soldiers. Italians ate rice and beans, same as everyone else, before the
You are talking about a part of the world that literally has caves with paintings of early humans hunting animals for food. There are a lot of regions in this part of the world where the landscape has been completely shaped centuries of animal husbandry. There are stories centuries old about wolves decimating herds.
Coffee was found by a goat shepherd because his animals couldn't sleep after eating the coffee beans.
You are completely delusional about the story of food in the world. People can rely more on cereal/bean farming because of advancement in agriculture, mostly after the industrial revolution. Because before the invention of the tractor, much of farming was actually reliant on, you guess it, animals (horses, cows, donkeys, etc.).
The thing is that animals were mostly reserved for the richer and the poor would die much earlier, very often from malnourishment/undernourishment from all the physical work they had to.
You guys are fanatics, ready to throw away centuries of Europe history just to "be right". It's pure insanity.
You're a not forced to eat or do anything. That's the same argument religious people have against abortions, even though no one is forcing you to have one.
> That's the same argument religious people have against abortions
No, That's the same argument religious people have about dietary restrictions.
In Italy food is a religion.
If Jews can have Kashrut and Muslims can only eat halal food (basically everything, except pork and its by-products), we can say no to lab grown food.
Why not?
Is it really progress to blindly accept everything, even if it could mean to completely hijack your own cultural traditions, that are such an important part of everyone's daily life?
No Jew ever died by eating non-kosher food. It's just a cultural tradition. Nonetheless we respect them, at least I do.
Well Israel doesn't ban unkosher food and _many_ Muslim countries don't ban non-halal food. I think most people would say that the countries that do ban food at a state level are pretty authoritarian.
Individuals that that follow Judaism and Islam _choose_ to limit their _personal_ diets. It's not forced upon them by the state (mostly?). To follow your analogy, you and the rest of Italy can say no to lab grown food, nothing is stopping you from not buying lab grown food.
On this specific topic though, I think banning lab grown meat could be done in a _somewhat_ reasonable way, they just went about it the wrong way. They could have just said they are worried about safety, jobs done.
Bringing in farmers, their livelihoods and tradition seems unnecessarily inflammatory.
> If Jews can have Kashrut and Muslims can only eat halal food (basically everything, except pork and its by-products), we can say no to lab grown food.
As an agnostic person who believes church and state should be very separate, you make the perfect argument for why I think this law is stupid. If you don't want to drink alcohol, smoke, eat pork or lab grown meat, go ahead. But don't force others into your religious ways of doing through restrictive laws. Just don't buy that stuff at the grocery store.
As an Italian from Rome, I am not only an atheist, but I'm deeply fond of the Roman Republic constitution that predates the Italian Constitution against the pope and the Vatican ruling over the people of Rome.
nevertheless food is like a religion for Italians
And religious and non religious people treat it like that.
we constantly talk about it, to the point that sometimes even I am sick of it.
you may be forced to eat the synthetic food when it is the only kind of meat you can afford after most meat producers switched to the a production chain that produces synthetic meat for higher profit.
Time will tell if synthetic meat substitutes take off, if that's technically feasible and well received by consumers, but I welcome the possibility of looking beyond what red meat mass producing monopolies impose us.
The discussion of cheap, non nutritious food can take place pretty much anywhere today, sugary drinks, fast food, boutique organics with high markup values, labor, etc. but that's a matter of economics, whereas the move in Italy, although reasonable for their economy, is impacting a much earlier phase: R&D and P&D.
Considering a lot of the nutrition in meat products comes from the fact that animals go around in the world collecting valuable nutriments for us to consume in easy to obtain and concentrated form; I very much doubt any synthetic meat will have success. Unless it is half the price and just use it as filler with supplements. Nothing like what we call meat in the end...
We're going to have to wait and see. Eletric cars didn't make much economic sense 30 years ago, but we've come a long way. Maybe in 20-30 years they might taste/have nutrients somewhat similarly and have a smaller environmental footprint, cheaper, etc. Call me optmistic.
Like our current food supply isn't highly processed already [0]... This law has nothing to do with preserving tradition. It has to do with populist right wing politics that ban anything new. High level cuisine will always exist, even when affordable alternatives arise.
Unless literally all headlines around this subject are incorrect (which wouldn't be the first time), Italy banned cultivated meat:
> Italian MPs have voted to back a law banning the production, sale or import of cultivated meat or animal feed
My Italian isn't good enough to actually judge whether this is a case of mistranslation or misinterpretation, so if you have any more nuanced quotes please provide some.
