Cultivated meat and dairy as a game-changing technology in the agricultural and food transition in the EU: What role for law?

Conventional meat and dairy production and consumption have a large impact on the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Climate change, land system change, biodiversity loss, fresh water depletion, disruption of nitrogen and phosphate cycles, ocean acidification as well as a range of direct impacts on human health are all to some extent attributed to livestock-keeping and meat and dairy consumption. In addition, there are serious animal welfare concerns about large-scale livestock-keeping for human consumption. A great food transformation is inevitable, as advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, as well as by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).To date, the EU’s regulatory approach to reduce the negative environmental, health and animal welfare impacts of livestock-keeping has been diverse and haphazard. Although the agricultural and food transition is about many different things, it generally revolves around moving from animal-based foods toward plant-based foods. Achieving such a transition requires a fundamentally different regulatory approach. This is not just about limiting some side effects of livestock-keeping, this is about reinventing the livestock sector altogether as well as about changing the dietary choices of European consumers. To make that happen, a comprehensive and robust regulatory approach will be needed. Recently, technology seems to have come to the rescue of the policy makers who are struggling to develop such a comprehensive and robust regulatory approach: cultivated meat and dairy. These have the advantage that not all European consumers have to turn to fully plant-based diets. Cultivated meat and dairy do not have the negative environmental and climate change impacts of conventional meat and dairy. This new technology might very well be a game-changer that may accelerate the agricultural and food transition. The emergence of this technology, however, does not mean that the transition will happen unassisted. For the introduction of a wide-scale adoption of cultivated meat and dairy production and consumption, laws and policies will be needed.This chapter answers the question of how law can facilitate a smooth agricultural and food transition, with a focus on the emergence of cultivated meat and dairy. It will do so through a literature survey and an assessment of the current, proposed and potential laws and regulations at the level of the EU in terms of their current and potential roles to achieve a transition to a food system without the large-scale involvement of animals. The literature on cultivated meat and dairy is mostly from such fields as food science, agricultural and environmental sciences, and resource economics. Legal scholarship on the topic is still lacking. The chapter will first briefly sketch the impact of meat and dairy production on the planet so as to show the urgency of the agricultural and food transition. It will then briefly map the current and proposed EU laws that seem to aim for a more sustainable livestock sector. Then, the chapter introduces cultivated meat and dairy and discusses the pros and cons of this new type of food. I discuss the laws and regulations needed to facilitate a large-scale introduction of cultivated meat and dairy: laws aimed at limiting the production of and demand for conventional meat and dairy, laws aimed at stimulating the production of and demand for cultivated meat and dairy, and laws aimed at ensuring that cultivated-meat production is safe, nutritious, fair and sustainable.