China is the real winner from Europe’s war on food innovation

In December 1975, a Kodak engineer called Steven Sasson unveiled a new invention to his bosses. It was the world’s first digital camera. It weighed 4kg and took 23 seconds to capture an image, but it was clearly revolutionary. 

Only it wasn’t to be Kodak’s revolution. Execs at the company – which at the time controlled more than 90% of the US photography market – were anxious it would cannibalise their celluloid business. “That’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it,” one is notoriously rumoured to have said. 

By the 1990s, when Kodak realised its mistake, competitors like Sony and Canon were leagues ahead. By then, competition was futile. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. 

When future historians search for examples of extreme economic self-sabotage, they may turn to a quieter moment: a trilogue meeting held in Brussels this year on the Common Organisation of Markets (or “CMO”). 

It was in this meeting, on 5 March, that EU negotiators reached a position – widely expected to pass through Council and Parliament – which effectively kneecaps Europe’s most promising recent homegrown technological revolution: cultivated meat. 

Just as digital photography transcended the downsides of celluloid (film is highly flammable and leaches harmful chemicals as it degrades), lab-grown meat promises to produce the meat we know and love with fewer downsides. 

While traditional meat involves rearing a whole animal before breaking it down into usable parts, cultivated meat starts with a small biopsy of real animal cells and scales them into the product we eat. The efficiency gains are enormous – just think of all the energy a cow wastes on burping, moving, frolicking and thinking. When powered with clean electricity, cultivated meat produces far fewer greenhouse gas emissions and uses far less land. 

Good for climate, good for nature and, without exposure to zoonotic pathogens and bucketfuls of antibiotics, healthier for humans too. 

And ironically, given the recent political assault on it from Brussels, it’s a European invention. The first cultivated burger was created by a Dutch scientist at Maastricht University, and a promising ecosystem of startups now exists across the bloc. 

No wonder the livestock industry – and their rapporteur champion MEP Céline Imart – are unimpressed. No industry likes competition, however homegrown. 

And whilst the exact words “that’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it” aren’t written into the final CMO text, a similar gagging order is. The presumed final text forbids cultivated meat, which has yet to reach the European market, from using the term “meat” or 31 related terms such as “beef”, “chicken”, “bacon” or “liver” on its labelling. 

This creates a bizarre situation in which only one of two biologically identical burgers made of cow cells – one from a slaughtered animal and one grown from cells of that same animal – can be described as “beef”. The alternative labelling options don’t look promising: “savoury muscle fibre patty” anyone?

The Kodak parallel is obvious. The incumbent meat industry is hoping that if no one can talk about cultivated meat, it will simply go away. The playbook is familiar: vested interests of a legacy industry tying up competition in red tape, much like the US fossil fuel lobby’s war on renewables. 

But no matter how protectionist an industry or nation, new technologies don’t obey borders. Europe has already lived through this with solar energy. Today more than 95% of the panels installed in Europe are made in China. We didn’t stop wanting them. We just stopped making them. 

The same pattern is emerging again. China is lending huge state support to novel proteins through its latest Five-Year Plan, and eight of the 20 most active patent applicants in the space are Chinese. Money is pouring into biomanufacturing R&D, industrial clusters, pilot-scale infrastructure, and regulation aligned to bring products to market. 

Meanwhile, cultivated products are already being sold as “meat” in Singapore, Australia and the US.

The EU’s response? Turn Europe into a museum of agriculture. As Sony and Canon learnt, early movers reap the greatest dividends. Catching up later isn’t a thing.  

Do we want to be as reliant on China for imported protein as we are for solar panels? If the CMO file passes, that future may be closer than we think. 

Joel Scott-Halkes is head of campaigns at WePlanet, an organisation coalition opposing the “veggie burger ban” in the CMO.