(Des Moines) Iowa lawmakers are considering a bill that would stop people using food assistance programs from buying egg alternatives.
Democratic State Representative Ako Abdul-Samad from Des Moines. It would also require egg alternatives to include words like “fake” or “lab-grown” on their labels to be sold in Iowa.
Republican State Representative Heather Hora from Washington says it applies to alternative meat labels.
District #23 State Representative Ray Sorensen says Senate File 2391, the Meat Integrity Act is simple – if it’s not meat, it should not say it is meat. It shouldn’t be labeled as an egg if it’s not an egg.
Sorensen says that as new products such as “lab-grown meat” come on the market, accurate labeling has become extremely important to ensure Iowa consumers know what they are buying and eating. His take is that these new labeling requirements are applied in the processing stage, not in the grocery store.
Iowa is a top state for meat and egg production, and all products processed there must be labeled correctly. It will also protect Iowa egg and livestock producers from bad actors who mislabel their foods, taking advantage of the longtime popularity of real meat and egg products and the hard work of generations of livestock farmers and egg producers. Sorensen says that schools are prohibited from buying lab-grown meat and mislabeled egg/meat products, but they are not prohibited from buying properly labeled meat or egg substitute products.
Regarding WIC and SNAP, the current USDA SNAP (Federal) guidelines do not outline egg alternatives covered by SNAP or WIC. This bill states that if USDA ever becomes more prescriptive and allows egg substitute products to be covered by SNAP, the state of Iowa would ask for a waiver to make it so that these products do not qualify for SNAP in Iowa.