Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared his support for banning a food product that barely exists — cell-cultivated or “lab-grown” meat — by dismissing the very concept at a press conference.
“We’re not going to do that fake meat,” DeSantis, a Republican, said to the crowd. “That doesn’t work.”
DeSantis was referring to a Florida state bill to ban the production and sale of cell-cultivated meat — which is different from products made by companies like Impossible Foods that use plant ingredients to mimic meat. Instead, cell-cultivated meat is real meat, but made without slaughtering an animal. It’s produced by taking a small sample of animal cells and feeding them a mix of amino acids, sugars, salts, vitamins, and other ingredients for a few weeks until it grows into edible meat.
Chef Nate Park slices a piece of GOOD Meat’s cell-cultivated chicken. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Florida bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Danny Alvarez, claims the novel technology’s “unknowns are so great,” despite a multi-year review from the US Agriculture Department and US Food and Drug Administration that deemed products from two cell-cultivated meat startups safe to eat.
Florida state Rep. Tyler Sirois, another Republican who introduced a similar bill late last year, stated a different — and perhaps more honest — motivation for banning cell-cultivated meat: to protect the state’s farmers from competition. “Farming and cattle are incredibly important industries to Florida,” Sirois said in an interview with Politico in November.
Sirois also called cell-cultivated meat an “affront to nature and creation.” I wonder if he would say the same about some of the pervasive practices used in the meat industry — like extreme confinement, feeding pigs feces, and grinding up live male chicks, to name just a few.
What’s happening in Florida is part of a broader political strategy to hinder the nascent cell-cultivated meat industry. Last month, lawmakers in Arizona introduced a similar ban, with one Republican supporter saying, “We want to protect our cattle and our ranches.” One of the co-sponsors is a rancher himself. The bill is advancing through the legislature, having passed out of two committees this month.
Meanwhile, politicians in Tennessee are pushing a cell-cultivated meat sales ban that imposes a $1 million fine on violators.
Federal lawmakers in heavy farming states, mostly Republicans but also some Democrats, are also putting up roadblocks to cell-cultivated meat with the support of the conventional meat industry.
In late January, US Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) announced a federal bill to ban cell-cultivated meat in school cafeterias. “Tester champions Montana’s ranchers” reads part of the headline of Tester and Rounds’s press release about the legislation, which has been endorsed by beef trade groups.
Days later, a bipartisan group of farm-state members of Congress introduced legislation — also endorsed by a number of meat trade groups — in both chambers that would require any cell-cultivated or plant-based meat product to be labeled as “imitation” meat or poultry.
Last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed a similar bill into law that restricts how cell-cultivated meat companies can market their products. Arizona is now considering even more restrictive labeling legislation.
Such protectionism runs counter to the routine platitudes that elected officials — especially those on the right — typically espouse about competitive free markets, regulation, and innovation. DeSantis has boasted that Florida ranks first in the nation in entrepreneurship, yet he’s supportive of a bill that would stifle entrepreneurship.
But the bills also ring hollow when you consider that cell-cultivated meat isn’t even available for sale.
Cell-cultivated meat has a long way to commercial viability (and it may not get there)
Last summer, two cell-cultivated meat startups made their product available in extremely limited quantities at a couple of high-end restaurants — one in San Francisco, the other in Washington, DC — for less than a year. Both have been phased out.
From 2016 to 2022, venture capital firms poured almost $3 billion into more than 150 startups around the world developing cell-cultivated meat technology, which is pitched as a solution to conventional meat’s enormous carbon footprint and its outsize contributions to deforestation, air and water pollution, and animal cruelty.
While plenty of the startups have demonstrated proofs of concept, it’s far from certain they’ll be able to scale and compete with factory-farmed meat; their products certainly won’t be showing up in school cafeterias anytime soon. Its advocates argue the field needs government funding, like the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries have received, to advance its research and development.
A scientist works in a cellular agriculture lab at the headquarters of GOOD Meat in Alameda, California, in June 2023. Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
On the surface, bills aiming to ban cell-cultivated meat could be waved away as mere political theater, a ratcheting up of the culture war by attacking alternatives to factory-farmed meat as a cheap way to own the libs during an election year.
But there’s something more troubling at play here. The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America’s dominant source of protein.
The political engine to protect factory farming, explained
Cell-cultivated meat is the latest flashpoint in a long-running fight over the future of protein; meat and dairy analogues made from plants, like oat milk and pea-based Beyond burgers, have already been targeted by hostile politicians.
Over the last decade, as these products entered the mainstream, lawmakers in around 30 states introduced legislation to restrict how companies can label them, and over a dozen have passed. Some laws went so far as to ban companies from using words like “burger” and “milk” even when their labels already made clear that the products were free of animal-derived ingredients, creating a costly, complicated patchwork of labeling requirements.
The bipartisan federal DAIRY PRIDE Act — short for “The Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, milk, and cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday Act” — would codify these restrictions nationwide for plant-based dairy products.
The proliferation of state restrictions has led some companies to use awkward descriptors that probably confuse more than clarify, like Trader Joe’s almond milk, which it calls “Almond Beverage.”
Some of the companies making these products have brought First Amendment challenges to push back. Louisiana and Mississippi each softened their regulations after lawsuits, and in 2021, a California judge ruled that the plant-based dairy company Miyoko’s Creamery could use terms like “butter” and “cheese” after the state’s agriculture department tried to prohibit it from doing so. In 2022, a federal judge ruled Arkansas’s labeling law unconstitutional. Challenges to other state laws are ongoing, but the bills keep coming: About eight states are currently considering restrictive labeling provisions.
If lawmakers are really concerned with deceptive labeling, they may want to focus their efforts in the meat and dairy aisle, where consumers have long been misled by warm and fuzzy terms like “sustainable” and “humanely raised,” both of which have no legal definition. Some terms that are defined and verifiable, like “free range,” often don’t meet consumers’ expectations.
The cell-cultivated meat bans and the plant-based labeling restrictions represent one side of agribusiness’s policy coin: proactive measures to weaken upstarts that could one day threaten its bottom line. The other side of that coin is sweeping deregulation that has made meat abundant and cheap, but at terrible cost to the environment, workers, and animals.
Agriculture is exempt from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and most farms are exempt from the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, loopholes that have resulted in awful conditions for animals and widespread pollution.
Chickens in cages at a conventional egg farm. Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images
Every state has a “right to farm” law, aimed at preventing rural Americans from suing factory farms for pollution, odor, and other nuisances. And about 10 states have passed “ag gag” laws, which make it a crime to document and investigate animal abuse on farms. Many have been struck down as unconstitutional, but some remain in place.
The sad irony of all the chest-thumping over meat alternatives is that farmers do face many real threats, like a changing climate that makes harvests less predictable and corporate consolidation that has put the majority of America’s meat supply in the hands of a few massive companies that hollow out rural economies and treat some of the farmers who contract for them like serfs.
Addressing these would take serious political courage, but it’s much easier to rile up the base by banning a perceived threat than taking on a real one.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
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