A Florida Republican is upset about lab-grown meat.
State Rep. Tyler Sirois has proposed legislation that would make selling “cultivated” meat illegal in Florida, calling it an “affront to nature and creation” and the latest front in the “ESG agenda”—an acronym for environmental, social, and corporate governance—which has been a target of Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican state leaders.
“Farming and cattle are incredibly important industries to Florida,” Sirois said in an interview on Wednesday. “So I think this is a very relevant discussion for our state to have.”
Sirois, a developer who claims to have no links to agriculture, expects Florida will be the first state to outlaw cultured meat.
He also has a significant friend in Wilton Simpson, the state’s agricultural commissioner and former Senate president, who is “100%” behind him.
“Without this legislation, untested, potentially unsafe, and nearly unregulated laboratory-produced meat could be made available in Florida,” said Simpson, an industrial egg farmer, in a statement.
Last June, the United States Department of Agriculture licensed two firms, Upside Foods and Good Meat Inc., to sell cultured meat, though it is not yet widely accessible in supermarkets. The artificial meat is generated from animal cells and may be fashioned into nuggets, cutlets, or other forms, and proponents believe it can lessen the environmental consequences of grazing, providing feed for animals, and animal waste.
“Instead of all of that land and all of that water that’s used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just Inc., which operates Good Meat, told The Associated Press.
The Association for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, which represents the nascent cultured meat business and has pushed its sale in restaurants, did not respond immediately to calls for comment.
According to the association’s website, cultured meat “will be a critical and sustainable component, working in partnership with the overall agriculture sector to meet increased demand for meat as the world’s population continues to grow.”
Sirois described the technique of producing meat in a laboratory using chemicals and enzymes as “deeply troubling,” and his proposal would make selling or distributing it a second-degree crime.
“I think it raises important ethical concerns about the limitations and boundaries we should place on this type of science,” he went on to say. “I think you could see a very slippery slope here leading to things like cloning, which are very troubling to me.”
Sirois further stated that the USDA and the federal Food and Drug Administration are both involved in the ESG push for lab-grown beef. He mentioned that earlier this year, the Legislature emphasized environmental, social, and governance score elements in state investments.
“That’s the message that is being sent here: that the laboratory-produced product is superior to conventional farming and cattle ranching,” he added. “But to me, my focus is on making sure No. 1 that we are not acting here without understanding the consequences of manipulating this material in a laboratory—manipulating cells that are harvested from animals—and also making sure Floridians have a clear understanding of what is going on here.”
The nonprofit advocacy group Organic Consumers Association and the trade and lobbying organization nationwide Cattlemen’s Beef Association have both expressed concerns about the production and labeling of cultured beef on a nationwide scale.
The Florida Cattlemen’s Association’s director of public relations, Sam Ard, told POLITICO that his organization hasn’t taken a stance on the measure but opposes labeling the lab-grown product “meat.”
“It’s not meat,” Ard pointed out. “Meat is derived from a cow.” Meat is derived from a living animal.”
What is lab-grown meat?
Lab-grown meat, also known as cultivated or cultured meat, is actual meat that has been generated directly from animal cells.
These products, according to UPSIDE Foods’ vice president of product and regulatory Eric Schuzle, are “real meat, made without the need to raise and slaughter animals.”
Cultivated beef may sound like a thing of the future, but it’s closer than you think to hitting store shelves. In reality, the first piece of lab-grown meat was shown to the public in 2013 by a team from the University of Maastricht, who delivered the first hamburger made from bovine stem cells. This original burger cost more than $300,000 to manufacture at the time.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the global population will exceed 9.1 billion by 2050, at which point agricultural systems will be unable to provide enough food to feed everyone. Could lab-grown meat, on the other hand, help fill this void? So far, here’s what we know.
Lab-grown meat is produced utilizing the more-than-100-year-old technology of in vitro muscle tissue development, according to researchers in the Journal of Integrative Agriculture.
“The process of making cultivated meat is similar to brewing beer in that this is an industrial cell culture process based upon well-hewn fermentation technology,” Schuzle said. “However, rather than yeast or bacteria, we grow animal cells. We begin by extracting a limited number of cells from high-quality livestock animals, such as a cow or chicken, and then determining which of those cells may proliferate and generate excellent meat food items.”
