Tennessee to regulate lab-grown meat through new legislation

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — New rules for lab-grown meat are set to take effect in Tennessee next month.

Lawmakers passed a bill this year to establish a permit process through the Department of Agriculture to sell “alternative protein” in the state. The legislation will also ban the words “meat” or “meat food products” from being printed on the label of lab-grown meat products, and create a $2,000 fine for breaking the rules.

“We’ve heard about cell-cultured protein or lab-grown meat for several years now, and this has become a concern for people among all walks of life,” Rep. Rusty Grills (R-Newbern), the bill’s sponsor, said.

Multiple states have passed legislation banning lab-grown meat, including Florida and Alabama.

However, Tennessee lawmakers shelved a bill that would have prohibited alternative protein in 2024 and instead passed legislation to regulate how the products are sold and marketed this year.

While lab-grown meat isn’t available in Tennessee yet, Dr. Neal Schrick, a professor at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, told lawmakers that will eventually change.

“I tell students in class they are going to have the opportunity for this in the future, it’s going to be available, and to me, it needs to be their choice,” Schrick said.

Schrick testified to lawmakers that lab-grown meat needs to be regulated and controlled. Most of its production process is protected by intellectual property, making it impossible to know everything inside the product.

The process that is known is complex.

“Now they’re using what they call scaffolding, which allows us to put the muscle fibers and the adipose or marbling, like we like to see in a good steak, be able to stack it, and you also see on that slide what they call 3D bioprinting, so that’s where the technology is going,” Schrick said.

In addition, lab-grown meat cannot filter out antibiotics on its own, which experts believe is cause for concern.

“We’ve asked that question. How are you going to remove it? There’s no liver, there’s no kidney, how are you going to clean this antibiotic? We have yet to get an answer,” Schrick said. “The original one was they would rinse it, but if it’s a steak, how are you going to rinse it out of the middle of a steak?”

Right now, there are two companies in the U.S. authorized to produce lab-grown chicken.