To the editor:
I was thrilled to learn the Food and Drug Administration granted regulatory approval for San Francisco based company Wildtype to sell its cultivated salmon in the United States. The product will debut at select restaurants. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from animal cells, without slaughter. It offers a number of potential environmental, public health and nonhuman welfare benefits.
“Wildtype’s achievement is a watershed moment for domestic seafood production and for the cultivated protein industry overall,” said Dr. Suzi Gerber, executive director of the Association for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation. “Food technologies meet the highest safety standards, and can play a vital role in healthy American diets, while strengthening our food system’s domestic production and resilience.”
Despite such progress, significant technological challenges remain for cultivated meat to reach price parity with incumbent, slaughtered options. Thankfully, these can be overcome with increased public funding for cellular agriculture research. Any politician interested in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, pandemic risk, and the suffering we inflict on animals should support this forward thinking effort.
Jon Hochschartner
Granby, CT
