Policy

Plant-based food company Upton’s Naturals and the Plant Based Foods Association took their case to the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals after an Oklahoma judge declined to put a hold on a state law requiring plant-based meat products to have a plant-based claim on their products that is the same size as the brand name.

The Singapore Food Agency (SFA), the lead agency for food-related matters in Singapore, has approved the sale of a cultivated meat product in the city-state. Eat Just Inc. appears to be the first company to have secured approval. According to SFA, Eat Just’s cultivated chicken was recently allowed to be sold in Singapore as an ingredient in the company’s chicken bites. Other products reportedly in the pipeline include Shiok Meats’ cultivated shrimp and Ants Innovate’s cultivated meat.

France aims to raise the area sown with protein-rich crops by 40% from 2022 as it seeks to cut the country’s heavy reliance on soybean imports from South America, Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie said on Tuesday. France and other European Union countries import millions of tonnes of soybean and soymeal each year, mainly from Brazil and Argentina, to feed livestock, making them dependent on world prices, trade relations and environmental practices overseas.

The overuse of antibiotics on farm animals is rife in some of the key countries with which the UK is hoping to strike a post-Brexit trade deal, a new report shows, raising fears that future deals will jeopardise public health and British farming. The US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all allow farmers to feed antibiotics routinely to livestock to make them grow faster, and in the US and Canada farm antibiotic use is about five times the level in the UK, data compiled by the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics shows.

An Oklahoma federal judge recently refused to block a state law that requires plant-based food companies include a disclaimer on labels if they use a meat term to describe their products. In September, Upton’s Naturals Co. and the Plant Based Foods Association filed suit against the state of Oklahoma challenging the constitutionality of the Meat Consumer Protection Act (“the Act”). The Act requires that plant-based food companies include a disclaimer the size of the product’s name if they use terms like “burger,” “hotdog,” “meatball,” “jerky,” “sausage,” “chorizo,” and “bacon,” even if the labels state the products are “meatless,” “vegan,” or “plant-based.”