Lab-grown meat is not currently available in any grocery store or restaurant in the United States. If some legislators get what they want, that will never be the case.
Earlier this month, Florida and Alabama banned the sale of cultured meat and seafood, which is prohibited. grown from animal cells. In Iowa, the governor signed a bill banning schools from purchasing lab-grown meat. Federal lawmakers are also seeking to restrict it.
It is not yet clear how far these efforts will go. Some cultured meat companies say they are considering legal action, and some states — like Tennessee — have dropped proposed bans after lawmakers argued they would restrict consumer choice.
Still, it’s a sobering end to a year that began with great optimism for the cultured meat industry.
The United States 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 American restaurants briefly added these products to their menus. Some cultured meat companies have started to increase production. One of Good Meat’s products went on sale in a grocery store in Singapore.
But soon after, politicians put the brakes on. Lawmakers in seven states have introduced legislation banning cultured meat, according to Kim Tyrrell, associate director of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In the U.S. Senate, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and Republican Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced a bill in January banning the use of lab-grown meat in school lunch programs.
The backlash is not limited to the United States. Italy banned the sale of lab-grown meat late last year. French lawmakers have also introduced a bill to ban it.
This decline is occurring even though lab-grown meat and seafood are far from reaching the market in any meaningful way due to their high cost of production. Cultivated products are grown in steel tanks using cells from a live animal, fertilized egg, or storage bank. The cells are fed with special mixtures of water, sugar, fats and vitamins. Once they grow, they take the form of cutlets, nuggets and other shapes.
Companies have focused heavily on increasing production to reduce costs and gaining government approval to sell their products. Today, they are also trying to find a response to state-imposed bans. Upside Foods has launched a Change.org petition, urging supporters to “tell politicians to stop policing your plate.”
“It’s a shame that they’re closing the door before we even take the plunge,” said Tom Rossmeissl, Good Meat’s global marketing manager. The company is considering its legal options, he said.
Supporters of these bans say they want to protect farmers and consumers. Cultured meat has only been around for about a decade, they say, and they worry about its safety.
“Alabamians want to know what they are eating, and we have no idea what is in this product or how it will affect us,” wrote Republican Sen. Jack Williams, sponsor of the bill. Alabama, in an email to The Associated Press. “The meat comes from livestock raised by hard-working farmers and ranchers, not from a petri dish grown by scientists.”
But those in the cultured meat industry say their products must pass rigorous government safety testing before going on sale. Their emerging industry isn’t looking to replace meat, they say, but to find ways to meet the world’s growing protein needs.
Rossmeissl said the United States currently leads efforts to expand cultured meat and seafood, with 45 companies in the sector, but that could change. In January, for example, an Israeli company received preliminary approval to sell the the first steaks in the world made from cultivated beef. China is also investing heavily in lab-grown meat.
“It should be surprising and concerning to Americans that we are putting up barriers to something that could be really important to our economy and our food security,” he said.
State Sen. Jay Collins, a Republican who sponsored the Florida bill, stressed that the legislation does not ban research, only the manufacturing and sale of lab-grown meat. Collins said safety is his main motivation, but he also wants to protect Florida agriculture.
“Let’s not be in a hurry to replace something,” he said. “It’s a billion-dollar industry. We feed tons of people across the country through our livestock, beef, pork, poultry and fish industries.
Rossmeissl thinks that meat industry is trying to avoid what happened to the dairy industry after the introduction of plant-based alternatives like oat milk. Vegetable milk accounted for 15% of U.S. milk sales last year; That’s up from about 6 percent a decade ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Good Food Institute, an advocacy group for plant-based and cultured products.
Meat producers supported bans in Florida and Alabama. Leaders of those states’ breeder associations — which are breeder advocacy groups — stood with both governors as they signed the bans.
But the situation is more complicated at the national level, where the meat industry does not support banning cultured products. Some meat producers, like JBS Foods, are working to develop their own cultured meat.
“We don’t support the idea of banning them outright,” 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 that the state’s ban was likely unconstitutional since federal law regulates meat processing. meat and interstate commerce.
The founders of Wildtype, a San Francisco-based company that produces farmed salmon, traveled to Florida and Alabama to testify against the bills but failed to influence the outcome. They hope someone will challenge the bans in court, but say it’s not realistic for their small business to take on that battle.
“We are David and on the other side of the aisle there is a gigantic Goliath,” said Arye Elfenbein, co-founder of Wildtype.
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Durbin reported from Detroit. Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida; Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Ala.; and Jonathan Mattise in Nashville contributed.
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A previous version of this story was corrected to show that Sen. Jon Tester is a Democrat, not a Republican.