Vegans by law: Government mistakenly bans meat, wine, beer, yoghurt and cheese

Sometimes a comma can completely change the meaning of a sentence, but it can also create huge problems, especially when talking about regulatory texts or state laws. This is the case of the controversial law against the production and sale of meat grown in laboratories, which is strongly supported by the Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Francesco Lollobrigida and loudly demanded by breeders associations such as Coldiretti. It is far from possible that the introduction of new products could create competition and harm existing farms, which have already been hit hard by the rise in production costs and the collapse in meat consumption, partly due to galloping inflation and partly due to a change in eating habits. Habits of citizens who have greatly reduced their consumption in recent years.

Blue pen error

Teacher and scientific communicator Matteo Flora pointed out this big mistake in a post about common products like wine, beer, yogurt, cheese, and even meat.

And all for one comma: In the text definitively approved by the House of Representatives, we read: “Operators in the food sector and operators in the feed sector are prohibited from using, selling, keeping for sale, importing, producing for export. Isolated from cell or tissue cultures obtained from vertebrate animals or to promote, apply for food consumption or distribute manufactured foods or feeds for the purposes specified above.” To ban the cultivation of meat alone in laboratories, a comma would be needed after “fabrics”; This comma will probably be inserted before it is published in the Official Gazette. To prevent this, from tomorrow all sections in all Italian supermarkets will be emptied and we can only buy the famous peach of the little girl whose parents are separated and a little more.

Is it also forbidden for animals to become pregnant?

Reading the text carefully – Matteo Flora points out this in another post – it seems that all vegetable growing is also banned; but technically animal pregnancy is an “intrauterine culture,” so a text written this way could result in a ban on even pregnancy, forcing poor farmers to spend a fortune on morning-after pills to prevent their animals from breeding. Another flaw in the law concerns precisely the types of animals mentioned: the cultivation of molluscs and all types of invertebrates is permitted, with the bans being limited to “vertebrates”. One user points out to the teacher another inconsistency in the part of the law that bans the use of meat-related names on behalf of products containing only plant proteins: “So – it says in the comment – a tofu flour sprinkled with carob is no longer ‘vegetable only’ and can be called ‘Fiorentina’ or not?” ?”.

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