Specifies that a food is deemed adulterated if it contains any cultivated meat
Summary
HB 1652 would amend Missouri’s food and drug law to expressly define “cultivated meat” as meat or food produced from cultured animal cells and to add cultivated meat to the list of conditions that make a food “adulterated” under state law. The bill repeals and reenacts sections 196.010 and 196.070 of the Missouri statutes, while leaving the broader framework of the state’s food, drug, and cosmetic definitions and adulteration standards in place.
In practical terms, the bill would prohibit cultivated meat from being treated as lawful food under Missouri’s adulteration statute. It also preserves an existing carve-out stating that food is not considered adulterated solely because it contains industrial hemp or hemp products. The measure is framed as a food-safety and labeling/standards amendment, but its operative effect is to bar cultivated meat products from the state’s food market by classifying them as adulterated.
Impact
The bill would directly change Missouri’s food adulteration law in Chapter 196 by adding a new statutory definition of cultivated meat and making any food containing cultivated meat adulterated per se. That would affect manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and any other parties involved in the sale, possession, or supply of food products containing cell-cultured meat, and could expose them to enforcement under the state’s food and drug laws and associated penalties. It would not alter the general definitions of food, drug, device, or cosmetic beyond the new cultivated meat language, but it would create a specific prohibition within the state’s food safety regime.
Sentiment
Based on the bill’s caption and lack of recorded committee testimony or votes in the provided materials, the bill appears to have been introduced as a targeted restriction on cultivated meat with no documented public debate in the available record. The overall posture of the measure suggests support from sponsors for limiting lab-grown meat in Missouri, while the absence of committee discussion or vote history prevents a fuller assessment of bipartisan sentiment. The referral to the Emerging Issues Committee indicates it was still in the early stages of legislative consideration.
Contention
The central point of contention is likely the treatment of cultivated meat itself: supporters would view the bill as protecting traditional agriculture, food standards, and consumer expectations, while opponents would likely argue that it unfairly singles out an emerging food technology and blocks market entry for alternative protein products. Another likely dispute is whether cultivated meat should be regulated as adulterated food at all, since the bill does not focus on contamination or safety in the conventional sense but instead imposes a categorical ban through the adulteration definition. No committee transcript is available here, so these concerns are inferred from the bill’s structure and subject matter rather than from recorded debate.