Where's the beef? Institutional (de)legitimation of cultured meat in France and Italy

While there is a growing interest among scholars in understanding the role that institutions and institutional actors play in the legitimation of emerging sustainable global industries, little is still known about how national institutional peculiarities and media discourse may affect the national acceptance of culturally-and technologically-debated innovations that could offer new opportunities for industrial change and development trajectories. This paper aims to address this gap in the literature by investigating how dynamically national institutions and institutional actors influence the social construction process for the legitimization of the cultured meat industry. Using Mediacloud we have collected newspaper articles, published from 2020 to 2023, linked to the culture meat debates in Italy and France, two countries still strongly rooted in traditional food specializations. By identifying communities of actors related through the news, and by then applying seeded topic modeling techniques, we analyze the content of major French and Italian national newspapers to unravel the specific roles that culture, the State, public authorities, and key influencers in each country play in the construction of the (de)legitimation of a new possible industrial trajectory in a seed phase. The results show that France's legitimation process for cultured meat is underway and is primarily associated with a more ethical and science-driven social construction of legitimation. In contrast, Italy lags behind, with a more gut-level culture of (de)legitimation which seems to exploit the narrative of "tradition" to hamper from the start any opportunity for a National industrial change in this respect.