"Italy's is a clear choice, a consistent choice, a unified choice, this is the novelty of this government: if millions of signatures arrive from us, if agendas approved almost all unanimously in the councils of 3.000 municipalities, if we get indications from 20 regions, if the majority of the political forces share this kind of approach, this government believes it has a duty to pursue this initiative, which we believe can not only be a flag or a point of reference, but can be serenely implemented in the European context and free Italy from synthetic meat". Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida spoke yesterday in the Chamber in general debate defending the bill banning the production and marketing in Italy of so-called "cultured meat", already approved by the Senate. The measure includes provisions banning the production and placing on the market of food and feed consisting of, isolated from, or produced from cell or tissue cultures derived from vertebrate animals as well as banning the name "meat" for processed products containing plant proteins. "We ban production, we don't ban research," Lollobrigida stresses, "And the two phenomena are not intimately linked, indeed, we have instructed Crea - which is our public research institute - to do research in this area to investigate any critical issues, or, on the other hand, to bring out scientific data with which to support, in a pragmatic way, different ideas from those that we now, instead, consider useful, in the sense of precaution, to have to take in this nation.