Cultured Meat
The 14th Five-Year Plan of China sets forth a national strategy toward a better food system that includes research and development of plant-based eggs and cultured meat, a shift that is sure to influence the rest of the world.
The Chinese government is focusing on shifting its food system away from traditional animal agriculture as outlined in its recently released Five-Year Plan of China. The 14th installation of the strategic plan includes the category “Optimizing the Development Strategy of Agricultural Science & Tech” under which the government describes its intent to bolster innovation from now through 2025 in the plant-based egg, milk, and protein spaces, along with focusing on emerging food technologies such as cultured meat.
The plan outlines that the country’s goals are grounded in the “research and development in cell-cultured meat, synthesized egg, milk, and oil, recombinant protein technology, and development and manufacture of nutritional food, improvement and implementation of value-added agricultural products, component integration and quality control, discovery of new food resources, big data, functional food, molecular food development, foodomics, and innovations in food risk assessment and detection.” This represents the first time that China has explicitly included a focus on plant-based and cultured meat alternatives to traditional animal products in its national strategy.
