Florida will become the first state to stop manufacturing and distributing lab-grown meat. Other states, such as Alabama, Arizona, and Tennessee, are also considering doing the same.
The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, approved this rule on May 1st and banned the production, saying, “Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere.” He added, “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
Lab-grown meat, also known as “cultivated” meat, is made from cells taken from animals. Instead of raising animals, this meat is grown in labs.
The ban doesn’t affect products like Impossible Meat, which is made from plants, not animal cells.
Governor DeSantis expressed his thoughts on the decision that he’s doing this to protect traditional cattle farmers and American agriculture.
He thinks lab-grown meat could harm them whereas, some people disagree with the ban. They say it’s not a good idea for a few reasons.
Firstly, lab-grown meat only recently got approval in the U.S., so they think it’s too soon to ban it.
David Kaplan, a biomolecular engineer from Tufts University, explains that the technology to make lab-grown meat isn’t advanced enough yet.
He said, “No one in the field has yet scaled up to the levels you need to produce food for supermarkets.” He further added, “There’s not even an industry yet. It’s just fledgling!”
Despite this, many companies and people who support alternatives to traditional meat see lab-grown meat as a solution to problems like environmental damage and ethical concerns related to meat production.
However, making lab-grown meat is still more expensive than raising animals for meat.
According to a 2021 study, it costs over three times as much to produce lab-grown meat compared to natural beef. This higher cost is likely due to the complexity of the process and the current limited scale of production.
Governor DeSantis says the ban on lab-grown meat is part of a bigger effort to counter what he calls “global elites.”
These powerful people meet at events like the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
He thinks they’re hypocritical because they tell regular people to stop driving gas cars and eat less meat to help the environment, but they themselves fly around in private jets.
Cattle farming, which involves raising cows for meat, has been criticized for contributing to climate change.
Cows release greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, which warm the Earth’s atmosphere. The amount of these gases that cows produce varies, but it’s significant globally.
Even though lab-grown meat could be a solution to some of these environmental problems, Florida is banning it.
Instead, it’s focusing on helping traditional cattle farmers. It plans to update laws to protect farmers from unfair lawsuits, make it easier for them to get tax breaks, and invest a lot of money into the state’s farming industry.
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