In May 2024, the U.S. culture war expanded to yet another bizarre front: lab-grown meat, with states like Florida and Alabama passing preemptive bans on its production and sale. These bans act as protectionist measures favoring traditional meat industries while limiting consumer choices. Critics argue that such policies are inconsistent with free-market principles and hinder innovation in the food system. The debate highlights broader issues of animal welfare, monopolistic practices in the meat industry, and the potential benefits of government support for alternative proteins. Despite political divides, there is a shared cultural value across the U.S. in opposing animal suffering and supporting better animal welfare practices.
From Free Market Champion to Protectionist: The Burger Flip-Flop
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has positioned lab-grown meat as a threat to traditional values, but critics argue that the real threat is to consumer choice and innovation. Banning an emerging competitor to the meat marketplace protects the existing meat companies.
While running for the GOP presidential nomination in July 2023, DeSantis remarked: “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism, in which the rules are configured to be able to help the incumbent companies.” Yet, it appears that corporatism is back on the menu for DeSantis’ Florida by favoring traditional meat companies, and in turn, reducing consumers’ dietary choices.
There is even opposition from the right itself to the recent Republican governors’ attacks on lab-grown meat. The American Conservative writes:
“Around 90 percent of Republicans, like most Democrats, consider it “unacceptable” to keep pigs in tight cages, kill newborn male chicks with meat grinders because they cannot lay eggs, or break the legs of chickens by fattening them with aggressive breeding practices. More significant are the disagreements between the parties on how to address harms to animals from modern farming.”
The article then proposes that Republicans believe in “technology and markets,” whereas Democrats “… are inclined to push for government mandates and consumer sacrifices to reduce the consumption of animal products.” Yet Republican governors are imposing government bans to reduce consumer choice. All four mechanisms – technology, markets, government support, and consumer choice – are vital in revamping the food system and improving animal welfare, and depend on each other. Moving towards a more plant-based food system is an opportunity for both political parties to work together to support goals like protecting animal welfare that are universally supported by Americans.
Whether it’s redirecting government subsidies away from meat companies to alternative protein companies and veganic farmers, the federal government has historically encouraged investment in new technologies. With government investment – such as grants to seed promising electric car companies and other climate-focused technologies – comes long-term benefits to consumers. For example, the US government provided research behind the core technologies of GPS and the Internet, and similar governmental support can help transition to a truly more humane food system that reduces the dependence on exploiting animals.
Why the Local Farmer Image is Misleading in the Corporatized Meat Industry
While signing the anti-cultivated meat bill, DeSantis said, “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.” This protectionist policy to ban competition uses the local farmer trope as a deflection from its anti-business practice.
There is hardly anything local about the meat industry in America. Four companies control almost the entire meat market and consequently squeeze producers. The American Prospect succinctly explains this local farmer illusion:
“Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef purchase and process 85 percent of beef in the United States, giving them immense economic control. They operate at the nefarious nexus of being both regional monopsonies and monopolies, having a significant sway on both the price of cattle bought off the ranch and the price of beef bought at the supermarket. These four middlemen firms are both the buyers and sellers.”
In this meat market, a few companies organize a monopolistic practice that limits the options small-scale farmers have and makes it more difficult for ordinary farmers to sustain operations. With the rise of meat alternatives, the best way to support farmers may be to offer transition support to farm plants, not animals. Mercy For Animals supports small farmers' transitions from raising animals to raising plants with their Transfarmation project.
A “Cultivated” Straw-Man Argument
A straw-man argument is a type of fallacy where a person misrepresents their opponent's argument in a manner that makes it easier to attack. Instead of refuting the actual argument, they attack the exaggerated, distorted, or simplified version that they created. This tactic can mislead the public into thinking they have successfully refuted an opponent's argument, when in reality they have only knocked down the straw-man they created.
"They will say that you can't drive an internal combustion engine vehicle. They'll say that agriculture is bad. Meanwhile, they're flying to Davos in their private jets…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…”
By shifting attention on a nefarious and nameless elite, this statement obscures how Florida's cultivated meat ban is telling people what they can and cannot eat. Rather, the outright ban of an emerging technology based on a cultivated straw man argument is at-best governmental overreach and at worst authoritarianism. Lab-grown meat’s disruption of an inefficient market by providing a product that doesn’t require the mass exploitation and slaughter of animals should be encouraged.
Whether or not so-called-elites say and do another thing does not pertain to the issue at hand – whether the government should unilaterally decide to ban a product from the marketplace. No one person’s own dietary changes will fix a systemic issue, however, that does not delegitimize efforts to raise awareness around more sustainable and efficient transportation options and food choices.
In terms of food choices, beef is one of the most polluting food options one can choose. Replacing conventional meat with cultivated meat has the potential to drastically lower environmental emissions while also greatly alleviating animal welfare.
Why lab-grown meat?
The benefits to cultivated meat are hardly mentioned in the rhetoric around these bans.
First, cultivated meat disrupts the inefficient farmed animal system. In this scenario, animals do not need to be raised, fed, and slaughtered. The Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank and international network of organizations working to accelerate alternative protein innovation, details the many positive environmental benefits of switching from conventional meat to cultivated-based meat.
Second, not only is inefficiency reduced but so is the immense and almost incalculable suffering caused by this draconian production system. In many ways, lab-grown meat may help meat-eaters who are sympathetic to suffering they cause through their dietary choices make more animal-friendly dietary choices.
The downsides to lab-grown meat are similar to any nascent technology coming online – it costs more than conventional meat products, as of now. Whereas conventional meat products benefit from prices that are artificially lower due to heavy US government subsidies and a weak regulation environment. Aligning the true cost of meat products with their prices in supermarkets may help spur more consumer demand for plant-based products and in turn spur more investment into cultivated meat technologies.
Cultivated Meat Responds
In early August 2024, Upside Foods, a company authorized to sell cultivated meat, challenged Florida's ban on its product in federal court. The ban, enacted through SB 1084, prohibits the sale, manufacture, or distribution of cultivated meat in Florida, with penalties including jail time and fines. Upside Foods argues that the ban violates the U.S. Constitution by unfairly protecting in-state businesses and conflicting with federal regulations.
The CEO and founder of Upside Foods, Dr. Uma Veleti, shared his opinion on Florida’s legislative ban:
“I watched the whole session, and I thought this is probably what it probably looked like several hundred years ago when people were challenging nearly every transformative innovation that came into the world and innovators had to fight and fight and fight,” he said on the Zoom call on Tuesday. “I felt like I was watching an old boys club trying to have a privileged group protected and protecting an incumbent industry. I just couldn’t believe that was happening at this day and age.”
A Political Re-imagination of Better Food Stalls
The lab grown meat hysteria reaches across the political aisle. Vox’s Kenny Torrella recounts how U.S. Democratic Senator, John Fetterman, posted an image on X, formerly known as Twitter, giving further credence to the pro-meat crusade, debasing cultivated meat as “slop.”
From southern Republican governors to a purple state Democrat U.S. Senator, there is resistance to innovative, climate-saving, let alone animal-saving, alternatives to the current unsustainable, cruel food system.
Legislative alternatives to the status quo food system have stalled in Congress. Senator Cory Booker, a vegan, introduced the Farm System Reform Act of 2023 that aims to put a moratorium on the construction of new factory farms by 2040 while also providing transition support from farmers moving to alternative agriculture activities. It has no Republican co-sponsors.
It remains unclear how a second Trump administration will regulate cultivated meat. If Trump’s first administration is any indication, animal welfare protections may weaken, as suggested by Vox’s Kenny Torrella.
Food Sovereignty as a Politically Unifying Issue
Despite the fragmented culture wars and heated politics, most Americans, across political spectrums, share the belief that animals should be treated well. Larger polling data supports this idea that there is a shared cultural value of opposing animal suffering and protecting animals with stronger government regulation.
This idea has recently been validated again when Kristi Noem admitted to shooting her puppy. Immediately, there was a bipartisan fallout with even the most ardent right wingers condemning the behavior. This unfortunate episode reveals the larger problem of speciesism in that the goat she also killed didn’t warrant as much outrage.
In a post-pandemic and hyper-polarized era, most people are more supportive of better and proactive animal welfare practices. As the battle over the food system intensifies, will innovation and compassion prevail, or will outdated and harmful practices continue unopposed?
