INTERVIEW Scordamaglia (Eat Europe): “Potential risks from synthetic meat; new EU evaluation criteria needed”

Brussels – New criteria that are serious and objective, and a comprehensive evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to manage the introduction on the market of meat and other lab-grown food. While the debate in Brussels on synthetic meat resumes, with Italy in the forefront with France and Austria, the CEO of Eat Europe, Luigi Scordamaglia, indicates to Eunews the way forward on an issue that is heating tempers in Brussels and Italy.

Rome, Vienna, and Paris — supported by at least ten delegations — today (January 23) brought to the attention of the EU Agriculture Council a document  asking the European Commission to assess the impact of placing cultured meat on the market. Even though, to date, no such request has landed in Brussels.

Eunews: A new Alliance against lab-grown food is taking shape in Europe. Italy, therefore, is not alone…

Scordamaglia: “Today’s passage is very important; starting from the document’s title, which is not a ‘No to synthetic products’ but aims to safeguard quality products, the land, and farmers. The question posed by the document – with increasing cross-sectional support from other countries – is what kind of agrifood model the European Union wants: a model comprising ties to the land and tradition or a future of standardization in which we simply ingest synthetic, standardized products just to meet basic nutritional needs. This is a profound question that the opening document asks.”

E: And what does it ask for? S: “It’s an approach that is anything but ideological: there is no left or right. We are asking ourselves and the European Commission to think about a simple fact: more and more scientific evidence highlights potential risks that never existed before in novel foods. So before considering any application for marketing authorization, the Commission should review the current guidelines (provided by EFSA to recommend to the EU the introduction on the market) that do not involve clinical or preclinical testing. A whole set of evaluation criteria that until now were not needed because no such foods had ever been presented today, in light of these potential risks, become essential. The document says more concretely that there are potential health risks that the current EFSA guidelines do not consider and, therefore, we need to stop for a moment, modify these criteria, and introduce new ones.” E:

Isn’t it premature to wage such a battle since to date no marketing application has been made?

S: “Had a marketing authorization application been filed today, it would have been assessed under the current EFSA guidelines for novel foods. A nutritional content assessment would have been made like the one applied to novel foods authorized in the past. We are asking to adjust the evaluation system before applications are filed and adjust them to technologies that are not currently in place. With the document, we are saying let’s turn on the light on this issue; let’s not let it go unnoticed; and let’s scientifically evaluate what is needed in the EFSA guidelines to have a serious, objective, and comprehensive evaluation criterion.”

E: The European Commission has postponed the proposal on harmonized nutrition labeling, but the Belgian presidency has organized a Nutriscore traffic light labeling system symposium on April 25. What do you expect?

S: “By giving the green label to synthetic products, Nutriscore tends to judge not on the overall quality of the food and the diet, but on the nutritional intake even if chemically or synthetically represented. Nutriscore also goes toward dietary standardization. I welcome any scientific insight as long as it is truly scientific. In countries where the Nutriscore is widespread (France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, ed. note), the obesity rate has not fallen. It has increased. The reason is not the individual food but the diet, the correct lifestyle, the quality of what we eat that affects obesity, which is the enemy to defeat.” E: Belgium is one of the countries that has adopted Nutriscore. Does this factor risk orienting the debate too much? S: “It’s bad if the scientific debate is constructed ad hoc and biased. I don’t think Nutriscore is a problem only for Italy. The alternative to dietary homologation is not only the Mediterranean diet. Nutriscore goes against the way of eating, in the broadest cultural sense, of all countries. Nutriscore is a homologation in which synthetic food is increasingly seen as swallowing a series, a chemical list of nutrients instead of having a quality food experience.”