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.
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…
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