Is vat tissue meat?

What do you call a hamburger made from meat that was grown in a giant vat, rather than from the ground-up flesh of dead cattle? Is it “meat,” “cultured meat” or something else entirely?

That sounds like the setup to a joke. But it’s an honest-to-goodness debate brewing among the advocates and detractors of a new class of meat products being developed by a number of biotech companies. This meat is grown from cultured animal stem cells and fed with nutrients to create alternatives to factory-farmed chicken, beef and pork, and it could be on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus in as a few as two years if regulators permit it.

Advocates call it “clean meat,” a name that evokes not just hygiene but also a lighter environmental footprint. And that’s the pitch: If consumers gravitate to a manufactured meat that tastes, looks and has the same nutritional composition as ordinary beef, chicken or ham, it could significantly reduce the need for factory-farmed animals and the greenhouse gas emissions that come from 1.5 billion ruminating cows. Also, meat grown in a vat is less liked to be exposed to harmful bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella because those bacteria develop in the intestinal tracts of live animals and typically taint meats as animals are slaughtered.

Pig farmers, cattle ranchers and other farm animal producers don’t care what the stuff is called, so long as it isn’t referred to as “meat.” They contend that this descriptor should apply only to the flesh or tissue harvested from the bodies of once-live animals, and they’re asking lawmakers and regulators to stop cell-cultured products from being peddled by that name. The legislators of one state, Missouri, have agreed, passing a law in June to do just that.

Yet in a perverse twist, conventional meat producers also want the U.S. Department of Agriculture (which has jurisdiction over meat products derived from animal carcasses) to regulate this new meat product, rather than the more appropriate U.S. Food and Drug Administration (which regulates processed and genetically engineered food). Farm groups are determined to have the agency that inspects, certifies and promotes their meat products to be the one that decides how their new rival will be labeled.

Some kind of accurate disclosure on these products makes sense, at least initially.

And you’d think that the makers of no-kill meat would embrace a designation informing consumers that no animals were harmed in the making of their brand of hot dogs or bacon. But labels should not be used to try to suppress what could be an environmentally friendly and humane source of food for a growing population or to give an unfair advantage to one industry.

Ultimately, it should be up to consumers to decide if they are interested in meat produced in industrial warehouses rather than carved from an animal carcass, no matter what it is called.