ETHICALLY, CAN EVERYONE EAT IT?
Now that the foetal bovine serum is out of the way (see p60), vegetarians could, ethically speaking, eat this meat – if they have an appetite for it.
The religious element is a little trickier. For meat to be permissible under Islamic and Jewish laws, there are strict rules on how animals are slaughtered and how the meat is prepared. Cultivated meat is set to trigger lively debates among religious leaders around the world (interpretations of scriptures vary geographically), and has already started doing so in some zones. Would cultivating meat from kosher or halal meat cells solve the problem? In Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, the influential Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama has reportedly given a statement putting cultivated meat in “the category of carcass which is legally unclean and forbidden to be consumed.”
In contrast, the Muslim-majority country Qatar is heavily investing in the technology, and building a production plant with GOOD Meat.
Meanwhile, in the London Beth Din (Court of the Chief Rabbi), there’s excitement at the prospect of a meat that could be a neutral food, under kosher law. Foods in milk or meat categories must be kept separate, so to have a neutral meat could provide a convenient loophole. And it could eventually provide cheaper kosher meat, which traditionally tends to be expensive. As Rabbi Conway says: “This is an extraordinary breakthrough and potentially a very exciting development for the kosher consumer. If the meat was available on a commercial scale, we would need full details of the manufacturing process and the ingredients used to rule whether it was kosher, but potentially this could make life easier and cheaper for kosher consumers.”