BERKELEY, Calif. — Rabbi Gavriel Price has thousands of years of Jewish religious law to draw on when he is on the job, determining whether a new food item can get a kosher certification from his organization, the Orthodox Union.

But all the rules about meat and milk, and the prohibitions on eating pork and sciatic nerves, are of limited use for Rabbi Price’s latest assignment.

The rabbi is in charge of figuring out how the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certifying organization in the world, should deal with what is known as clean meat — meat that is grown in laboratories from animal cells. This brings him in touch with a possibility for Jewish cuisine that had previously seemed impossible: kosher bacon.

Clean meat is still not available in stores, but start-ups working on it say it could be by next year. When it is, they want a kosher stamp on their product, which indicates it adheres to quality and preparation standards and follows a set of biblical laws. That brought Rabbi Price, a tall, lanky father of eight, to Berkeley recently, to meet with companies in the business.