Florida has become the first State in the US to ban laboratory grown meat. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill on Wednesday which bans the sale of any form of lab grown meat. The bill is clearly a move to appease the state’s cattle industry.
In a statement the state’s commissioner of agriculture said it was protecting the interests of the state’s farmers as well as the integrity of American agriculture. The lab grown meat ban is also one of the many other pet causes of DeSantis.
DeSantis said just after the bill was signed,
“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,”
In a press release it was said that Florida was negating the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects.
However it must be remembered that lab grown meat is still not available for the consumers. Lab grown meat is harvested from animal cells and the FDA has given approval to two entities Upside Food and Good Meat to make the lab grown meat. The two companies also do not have any outlets to sell this meat. Till date only two high end restaurants China Chilcano, Chef José Andrés’ high-end Peruvian restaurant in Washington, DC, and Bar Crenn, a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco have served lab grown meat to the consumers. However both these restaurants have stopped featuring the lab grown meat on their menu.
The lab grown meat industry has not even started competing with the farmers but it seems the ban is a way to preempt any such possibility. A section of the population believes that the move is a consequence of a conspiracy theory which stated that the “globalists” are forcing people to eat bugs and live in pods. This theory is also known as the “Great Reset,” which was first coined in 2020 after a World Economic Forum initiative that urged governments to use the pandemic to promote sustainable development. The Right Wing experts connected it with a 2016 World Economic Forum blog post which talked about the possible use of bug protein and a 2013 book about insect farming published by the United Nations.
Lab Grown or cultivated meats are harvested in bioreactors using cells from animals. Startups are working on chicken, fish and beef meat. The promoters of lab grown meat contend that the process will in the long run significantly lower the greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing meat. The process of making lab grown meat involves extracting living cells from an animal and feeding it with nutrients such as proteins, sugars and fats. The final product is much akin to traditionally produced meat in taste as well as composition.
For example the Los Angeles startup Meat uses the plasma of cows to grow meat for ground beef. It takes about three years to raise a cow to 300 kilograms of meat. However 2000 kg of meat can be produced in a year from a single cow’s plasma and there is no need to slaughter the animal also.
However lab grown meat is extremely energy intensive and the startups have not been able to scale up the production and bring the price down.
The U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, an association which represents the traditional meat producers have vehemently opposed cultivated meat citing safety concerns and have been lobbying to prevent the lab grown meat to be referred as beef.
Good Meat, a lab grown Meat Company which is the first in the world to sell lab-grown meat, wrote on X it was “disappointed” by the new Florida law.
