I was exasperated to hear this week that Florida has become the first US state to ban lab-grown meat. A major American state well-known for limiting regulatory burdens has chosen to take away consumer choice and stifle innovation.
Even worse, Governor Ron DeSantis’s justification is a conspiracy theory. “Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish,” he said. Spoiler alert: there is no global elite plan to force anyone to eat anything. The World Economic Forum says plenty of daft things, but they are not about to become a global government.
The other justification, according to Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson, is that cultivated meat ‘is in direct opposition to authentic agriculture’. Indeed, it may someday compete with conventional meat. But since when was that reason to ban a product? This is no different from carriage drivers trying to ban the motor vehicle. Humanity progresses by allowing for the displacement of the old with the new.
Last year, the IEA published my paper on cultivated meat, Bangers and Cash: Cutting Red Tape to Put Britain at the Centre of the Cultivated Meat Revolution.
The paper's purpose was twofold. First, it highlighted the potential of a new innovative product, meat produced in a lab, to alleviate many of the concerns associated with livestock farming. It can help the environment by cutting down on carbon emissions and land use, improve human health by reducing the risk of zoonotic pathogen spillovers creating pandemics, and finally, improve animal welfare by reducing industrial practices.
Second, the paper calls for reform of the ‘novel food regulations’. These were rules introduced by the European Union, originally introduced in the 1990s and retained in the UK since Brexit. I examined how these regulations could prove too slow and cumbersome for a fast-moving industry. There are already serious moves afoot by EU and UK cultivated meat start-ups to relocate to the United States.
