Modern foods made from technologies like Precision Fermentation (PF) and Cellular Agriculture (CA) are actually safer than foods made in our traditional livestock model. Consumers are likely to face disinformation about the safety of modern foods.

Food regulation, including rigorous testing, is crucial to ensure the foods we consume are healthy and safe to eat. Most jurisdictions have a food regulation board, like the FDA and USDA in the United States, that must approve new food products that come on the market.

Modern foods made from technologies like PF and CA are actually at an advantage when it comes to food safety. Most deaths and illnesses that result from food consumption are caused from contamination by the fecal matter of livestock animals. Since the supply chain of these modern foods do not contain animals, there is a significantly lower risk of contamination and therefore related illnesses.

Despite this, consumers are likely to face conflicting information and disinformation about the relative merits and safety of modern food versus traditional animal products, and powerful industry lobbying is likely to be creating false narratives. Policymakers can ensure that consumers are able to make well-informed choices by ensuring that accurate information is readily available to the public, with clear and consistent rules around labeling that apply to both animal-derived and modern foods and manufacturing processes.

Explore the evidence...

• In the United States, the FDA manages regulatory approvals for ingredients that are entering the food system. They do this primarily through granting GRAS status which indicates that the ingredient is considered safe by experts and therefore exempt from food additive tolerance requirements, a process that can be quite onerous.
  • Learn more about the approval of cellular agriculture in this blog.
  • Learn about the safety and regulatory approval process of precision fermentation in this blog.
• Proteins created by modern food production methods are already used in healthcare, vitamins and cosmetics. We already eat many foods with ingredients produced by PF, yet very few of us are aware of it. These include valencene (orange taste and smell), raspberry aroma, sweeteners like thaumatin and vitamins, as well as a number of enzymes used in food processing like rennet, amylase or lipase. Explore our periodic table of precision fermentation to learn more about incredible range of products on the market made using PF today.

Witness the transformation

The disruption of food & agriculture by modern food technologies is primarily a protein disruption driven by economics. The cost of modern proteins will be five times cheaper than existing animal proteins by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035. Eventually, they will be nearly as cheap as sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute–more nutritious, healthier, better tasting and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.

The choices decision-makers take in the near term will have a lasting impact–those regarding intellectual property rights and approval processes for modern food products, for example, will be critical.

Learn more about the disruption of food & agriculture.

Published on: 12/07/23