Why GOP-led states are suddenly making it a crime to sell lab-grown meat

Lab-grown meat isn’t on grocery store shelves in the United States and it isn’t coming anytime soon, but two states have already banned it and others are weighing similar moves.

The restrictions are a sign that traditional meat producers fear losing market share to these new products, but they’ve also been divisive. Some in the livestock industry question the precedent of these actions in GOP-led states, fearing they could embolden blue states to further regulate meat production, including how chicken and hogs are raised.

So far this year, lawmakers in Florida and Alabama have made it a criminal act to manufacture and sell lab-grown meat in their states. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went first, signing a bill earlier this month and warning cellular agriculture companies: “Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere … we’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”

Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey followed six days later, much more quietly, with a measure that makes selling lab-grown meat a misdemeanor. Legislators have introduced similar bills this year in Arizona and Tennessee, but they appear unlikely to make it to the governors’ desks. Others may follow. After Florida enacted new legislation, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told Texas Scorecard, a conservative publication, that he would be in favor of doing the same.

“I commend Governor DeSantis for signing that bill. It’s something that hopefully will start a trend. Maybe we can possibly get that through the Texas legislature,” Miller said.

Who is behind these bans?

The push to prevent a product that isn’t commercially available from ever reaching consumers is a reflection of how some cattle ranchers and other livestock producers are highly concerned about cell-based beef and chicken.

Fear of competition from lab-grown meat, also known as cultivated meat, has been percolating for years. The United States Cattlemen’s Association has advocated for national labeling rules that would only apply the term “beef” to products derived from livestock raised by farmers and ranchers. Since 2018, more than a dozen states have passed laws making it illegal to use the word meat to describe burgers and sausages made from plant-based ingredients or meat products grown in labs. Others, such as Montana and Texas, require labels informing consumers that a food contains lab-grown meat.

When DeSantis signed the Florida ban earlier this month, he talked not about health or safety concerns but about the need to protect the state’s farmers and ranchers. “We will save our beef,” he said.

Yet the arrival of cultivated meat start-ups has exposed divisions within the beef and poultry industries.

According to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes meat alternatives, from 2016 to 2022, investors poured almost $3 billion into lab-grown meat and seafood companies. Some of that money came from America’s largest meatpacking companies, including Tyson and Cargill. JBS, the world’s biggest meatpacker, is investing in cultivated meat production in Brazil.

As Alabama weighed a potential ban, The Meat Institute, the trade group that represents big meatpackers, came out against the measure in a March letter, calling it “bad public policy that would restrict consumer choice and stifle innovation.” The group warned that the ban could encourage other states to pass their own restrictions on meat sales, as California did in 2018 when voters approved a ballot measure requiring that pork sold in the state come from hogs kept in pens that allow them to move around.

And not all cattle ranchers are in agreement. While the Florida arm of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association supported the state’s ban, the national organization isn’t as enthusiastic.

“At the national level, we’re not afraid to have these products come to market,” said Sigrid Johannes, the National Cattlemen’s senior director of government affairs. What the group does want to see is language included in the next Farm Bill that would require cultivated meat and plant-based foods that resemble meat to carry the label “imitation” in the same font, the same size, as the word beef. “When people are looking at that label, they should know exactly what they’re buying,” Johannes said.

What’s the argument for cultivated meat?

Supporters envision a future where meat is grown from cells in laboratories, not pastures. This, they argue, would not only help meet the world’s increasing demand for protein, it would also solve some of the livestock industry’s most stubborn problems, such as animal cruelty concerns and the fact that livestock production is estimated to cause about 12 percent of all human-related climate pollution globally.

The climate impact of cattle is especially large compared to other livestock. Researchers have been trying for years to find a solution for the industry’s emissions of methane - a greenhouse gas 23 times more warming than carbon dioxide - that cows produce during digestion. At the same time, the world’s increasing demand for beef is fueling deforestation to clear land for cattle grazing, resulting in the loss of forests that scientists say are essential for absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

As the market for meat grows, global climate pollution from raising livestock is expected to increase by nearly 50 percent by 2050. To proponents of lab-grown meat, replacing even some of America’s vast pastureland and feedlots with high-tech laboratories is a potential solution worth pursuing.

“We should be encouraging and going down every path that helps us create food,” said Sparsha Saha, a lecturer at Harvard University whose specialty includes meat politics. If other states copy Florida and Alabama, “it could be disastrous for the public interest in the long run. Imagine a ban on renewable energy - that’s the comparison. It’s tragic to see this being thrown into political theater,” she said.

Who is affected by these bans?

In some ways, lab-grown meat is the perfect political target because Americans can’t get too worked up about having a product pried from their hands if it isn’t for sale yet.

Only a few companies have won approval from the Agriculture Department and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make lab-grown meat in the United States, and they still have to overcome hurdles before they can sell it to restaurants and grocery stores. Some of those obstacles are regulatory and some are scientific. The companies will also have to find ways to make their products cost competitive with the meat on offer today.

For Good Meat and Upside Foods, a pair of Bay Area food technology companies that have been working on cultivated meat for years, the bans in Florida and Alabama are not likely among the companies’ top concerns.

“The bans are disappointing, but they’re a distraction from our primary focus right now, which is commercialization,” Melissa Musiker, head of communications at Upside, wrote in an email. The company is focused on getting its first products - chicken sausages, chicken sandwiches and dumplings - through regulatory approval and into select restaurants.

“Demand for meat is expected to double in 2050, so we hope to be making meaningful progress towards capturing some of that market share in the next 5-15 years,” Musiker wrote.