A pair of bipartisan senators proposed legislation last week to keep lab-grown meat out of the school cafeteria.
On Friday, Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., announced the School Lunch Integrity Act of 2024 prohibiting cell-cultivated meat from being included in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP).
“Our students should not be test subjects for cell-cultivated ‘meat’ experiments,” said Sen. Rounds. “South Dakota farmers and ranchers work hard to produce high quality beef products. These products are often sold to South Dakota schools, where they provide necessary nutrition to our students. With high quality, local beef readily available for our students, there’s no reason to be serving fake, lab-grown meat products in the cafeteria.”
The first product of cultivated meat came in the form of a lab-grown burger unveiled by a Dutch scientist in 2013. Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave the first agency approval for the public sale of lab-grown meat to UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat. But questions remain surrounding the health and environmental consequences of synthetic meats manufactured in a lab.
“I’d rather eat my shoe than lab-grown meat,” said nutritionist and food author Diana Rodgers in a summer interview with the New York Post.
“Because of a lack of available nutritional information on lab-grown meat,” the Post reported, “Rodgers could not say how healthy cell-cultured meat is.”
“We just don’t know,” Rodgers told the Post. “I have yet to see a life cycle assessment
