Missouri bills: If it comes from a lab, it’s not meat

As the sale of cell-cultured foods become closer to a reality, lawmakers in Missouri want to protect its livestock and poultry producers. If you don’t know what cell-cultured foods are, another name to which I have heard them referred is laboratory-grown meat. However, the latter name is exactly what the legislators don’t want to hear or seen used in the Show Me State.Bills in both the state’s Senate and House of Representatives have been proposed that if passed, would prohibit companies from advertising and promoting those products as meat.Rep. Jeff Knight has proposed Missouri HB 2607, while Sen. Sandy Crawford has proposed Missouri SB 977. The bills are identical, and read as follows: “Currently, no person advertising, offering for sale, or selling a carcass shall engage in any misleading or deceptive practice including misrepresenting the cut, grade, brand or trade name, or weight or measure of any product. This act also prohibits misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.”