ICultured meat is not currently available in any U.S. supermarkets or restaurants. If a few lawmakers get their way, it will never happen.
Earlier this month, both Florida and Arizona banned the sale of meat and seafood grown from animal cells. In Iowa, the governor signed a bill that prohibits schools from purchasing lab-grown meat. Federal lawmakers also want to restrict it.
It is unclear how far these efforts will go. Some cultured meat companies say they are considering legal action, and some states — like Tennessee — have shelved proposed bans after lawmakers argued they would restrict consumers’ choices.
Still, it’s a disheartening end to a year that started with great optimism for the cultured meat industry.
See more information: The case for lab-grown meat
The US approved the sale of lab-grown meat for the first time in June 2023, allowing two California startups, Good Meat and Upside Foods, to sell cultured chicken. Two high-end U.S. restaurants briefly added the products to their menus. Some cultured meat companies have begun to expand production. One of Good Meat’s products went on sale in a grocery store in Singapore.
But it didn’t take long for politicians to hit the brakes. Lawmakers in seven states have introduced legislation that would ban cultured meat, according to Kim Tyrrell, associate director of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In the U.S. Senate, Republican senators Jon Tester of Montana and Mike Round of South Dakota introduced a bill in January to ban the use of lab-grown meat in school lunch programs.
The backlash is not limited to the US. Italy banned the sale of lab-grown meat late last year. French lawmakers have also introduced a bill to ban it.
The resistance is happening even though lab-grown meat and seafood are far from reaching the market in any meaningful way because they are so expensive to produce. Cultivated products are grown in steel tanks using cells from a live animal, a fertilized egg or a storage bank. The cells are fed with special mixtures of water, sugar, fats and vitamins. Once they grow, they turn into chops, nuggets, and other shapes.
Companies have focused heavily on scaling production to reduce costs and gaining government approval to sell their products. Now, they’re also trying to figure out how to respond to state bans. Upside Foods launched a petition on Change.org, calling on supporters to “tell politicians to stop policing your plate.”
“It’s a shame they’re closing the door before we even leave,” said Tom Rossmeissl, head of global marketing at Good Meat. The company is considering its legal options, he said.
Proponents of the bans say they want to protect farmers and consumers. Cultured meat has only been around for about a decade, they say, and they are concerned about its safety.
“Alabamas want to know what they are eating and we have no idea what is in that stuff or how it will affect us,” wrote Republican state Sen. Jack Williams, sponsor of the Alabama bill, in an email to the Associated Press. “Meat comes from cattle raised by hard-working farmers and ranchers, not from a petri dish grown by scientists.”
See more information: The short-sighted effort to ban cell-cultured meat in some states
But members of the cultured meat industry say their products must pass rigorous government safety tests before they go on sale. Their nascent industry isn’t trying to replace meat, they say, but rather finding ways to meet the world’s growing need for protein.
Rossmeissl said the US is currently leading the effort to develop cultured meat and seafood, with 45 companies in the space, but that could change. In January, for example, an Israeli company received preliminary approval to sell the world’s first steaks made from cultured beef. China is also investing heavily in lab-grown meat.
“It should be surprising and concerning to Americans that we are erecting barriers to something that could be really important to our economy and food security,” he said.
State Senator Jay Collins, a Republican who sponsored the Florida bill, noted that the legislation does not prohibit research, only the manufacture and sale of lab-grown meat. Collins said safety was his main motivator, but he also wants to protect Florida agriculture.
“Let’s not be in a rush to replace something,” he said. “It’s a billion-dollar industry. We feed many people across the country with our livestock, beef, pork, poultry and fish industries.”
Rossmeissl believes the meat industry is trying to avoid what happened to the dairy industry after the introduction of plant-based alternatives such as oat milk. Plant-based milk accounted for 15% of U.S. milk sales last year; That’s up from about 6% a decade ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Good Food Institute, a farmed and plant-based advocacy group.
Meat producers supported the bans in Florida and Alabama. Leaders of those states’ livestock associations – which are rancher advocacy groups – stood alongside both governors as they signed the bans into law.
But the picture is more complicated at the national level, where the meat industry does not support a ban on farmed products. Some meat producers, such as JBS Foods, are working on developing their own cultured meat.
“We don’t support the idea of banning them completely,” said Sigrid Johannes, director of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. “We are not afraid to compete with these products in the market.”
The Meat Institute — which represents JBS, Tyson and other major meat companies — sent a letter to Alabama lawmakers warning them that the state’s ban was likely unconstitutional, since federal law regulates meat processing and interstate commerce.
The founders of Wildtype, a San Francisco-based company that makes farmed salmon, traveled to Florida and Alabama to testify against the bills but were unable to influence the outcome. They hope someone challenges the bans in court, but say it’s unrealistic for their small business to fight that battle.
“We are David and across the hall is a giant Goliath,” said Wildtype co-founder Arye Elfenbein.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
