ATLANTA — While one group of lawmakers wants to require labels for meat and meat alternatives outside of the norm, others want to ban it from Georgia.
A bipartisan group of Georgia lawmakers want to ban the sale, trade or distribution of lab-grown meat in the state.
This effort is separate from a bill that would instead require any restaurants or stores that sell lab-grown, cell-cultured meat or plant-based alternatives label them explicitly as not meat, as well as making it illegal to advertise the products as meat.
For the ban bill, some Democrats and Republicans have come together to sponsor the ban on selling any meat that doesn’t come from animals in a natural way.
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According to the bill, animal meat would mean meat that comes from any animal, including “cattle, swine, sheep, goats, fish, and poultry, including eggs, raised for the production of an edible product or products intended for human consumption.”
Lab-grown meat, by comparison, would be “cell-cultured meat.”
For the purposes of the legislation, meat is legally defined as “flesh, offal or other by-product of any part of the carcass of an animal that has been slaughtered.”
The bill would make it illegal for anyone in Georgia to sell, offer for sale, trade or distribute lab-grown meat in the state.
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