Ottawa—Some clear thinking needs to go into the regulation and labeling of new foods produced from plants or in laboratories, says Don Buckingham, the former president of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute.He calls the challenge facing food producers and governments “Regulation in the Time of the Protein Wars.” It began with the introduction of margarine in 1949.The federal government has “the lions-share of health and safety regulation and a good portion of standards and quality claims for food production and distribution. That includes the Food and Drugs Act and Regulation and the Safe Food for Canadians Act and Regulations and a fair amount of policy on food labelling such as the simulated meat and poultry products guidelines of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.“We have come a long way from coloured margarine and coffee whiteners, and today there is a fold of new products that are meant to mimic traditional products and a lot of these are in the protein space,” said Buckingham, who now is teaching a Canadian law course at Trinity Western University. They include butters, milks, cheeses, eggs and meats, which employ terms associated with farm livestock, not plants.Synthetic agriculture is the high tech realm of biological transformation of synthetic ingredients into foods, he said. “One or many of the processes to produce this food require genetic engineering and are or would be considered novel under Canadian food law.”New products are being formed from new sources--plant, marine, and insects—through technologies that range from chemical and physical manipulations to full-on biological reconfigurations of traditional protein products.Work is underway in the U.S. on developing fungi to make dairy protein that is molecularly identical to the protein in cow's milk, so it can be used to make dairy products such as cheese and yogurt, Buckingham said.Cellular agriculture will produce a meat equivalent in a vat, he said. “No small task in terms of technological knowhow, equipment, energy and waste disposal and then of course, transport, distribution through retail or food services to consumers.”This system faces challenges in scaling up and contamination, he said. “Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.”There are other reasons why the switch to cellular might not come as fast as some hope. Among them are questions whether the technology works well enough and will produce better health and climate outcomes than farming. Also livestock production involves land not suited to crop production and grain not suitable for human consumption. There are also questions about plant-based food's cost and taste and how it will fit into consumers' eating patterns.Buckingham thinks conventional agriculture and novel foods can coexist if “we don't become too hysterical and find an appropriate regulatory response—not too fast and not too slow.”He noted that cultured meat will likely be held to be a novel food in Canada because it doesn't meet the current definition of meat in Canadian law and could also be considered genetically engineered, which require a safety review before it is approved. “No application to Health Canada for approval yet to my knowledge.”