37
votes
Florida is the first state to ban lab grown meat - Ron DeSantis
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- Title
- Florida Becomes First State to Ban the Sale of Lab-Grown Meat
- Authors
- Maggie Malson
- Published
- May 1 2024
- Word count
- 394 words
"We're cool with whatever nightmare scenario is concocted by the horrific practices that big agri can cook up with antibiotic overuse, fecal contamination, cannibalism, and a litany of other nightmares but a sterile lab grown meat is over the line!"
-Most of these schmucks
He explicitly referenced "ideology" as well, which suggests to me that he's hinting at veganism and other moral objections to the meat industry. It fits with the Republican M.O. of tapping wedge issues and Identity politics, and whispering to their 'constituents' to give in to their worst impulses like some Best Value Emperor Palpatine.
There's a house I pass on my way into town with a big flag on their garage door reading "TRUMP 2024: No More Bullshit," and every time I pass it, I'm confused for a brief moment.
I'm only surprised that he omitted the word "woke" before "ideology."
I'm honestly completely flabbergasted by the mental contortion these people are going through to justify this. Their agricultural commissioner saying that this is an issue of food security quite literally sounds like the ramblings of a madman. Does he really think that there are people in the country who are literally starving to death? Do they have some sort of disease going around that prevents people from absorbing nutrition from anything that is not an animal? And even if that's all true, how on earth is cultured meat going to hurt anyone? Why are they even doing this when the product is so rare it basically doesn't exist right now?
I knew that Florida was run by madmen and morons, but my god, this is next level insanity. I've already had Florida in my no-go list, but I'm honestly thinking about doing a blanket ban of businesses from there because of this. These people should not be supported even indirectly. These politicians have done so much damage and sabotage to their people I have no clue why the state hasn't gone through some sort of coup d'etat at this point. It's actually kind of painful to me because I know many people from the state who are suffering because of the multitudes of bad policy they have enacted in the past few decades.
Florida ranks 13th in the country in regards to number of cattle nation wide.1. One quote from Desantis stated "They'll say that agriculture is bad."2. I believe the real motive here it so "protect" the cattle industry, and maintain the status quo. Similar to how Trump et. al were speaking directly to coal miners leading up to the 2016 vote.
It's literally just the beef industry buying a law to stifle their competition
Lab grown meat seems like such a common sense approach to dozens of problems the future faces: hunger/starvation, reduction of greenhouse gases, ethical treatment of animals...
I literally see nothing but wins... It figures that this dip shit puts some kind of regressive narrative around it. At this point it just seems like him and his ilk wish to just cast humanity into the flames at all costs.
The policy rhetoric can really boil down to "it make nice people and smart people happy, so we must destroy it"
Not shocked at all that they did this. I'm still dumbfounded by the lack of accountability there is for the meat industry and their emissions.
I wonder if this will even survive a court challenge. Religious liberty may be the biggest challenge to this law. Consider how religious liberty laws have been used to challenge abortion restrictions.
There are many religions that prohibit the eating of meat. And conservative states, in recent years, have gone out of their way to pass laws granting broad religious exemptions to state laws. They primarily intend these as a means to allow conservative Christians to discriminate against LGBT people, but the laws have to be written broadly. There are likely many religions that would prohibit the eating of regular meat but would allow the eating of lab-grown meat. This law likely directly tramples on the rights of religious vegetarians to practice their faith. The state is of course allowed to pass laws that violate religious principles. But especially in conservative states that have passed expanded religious liberty laws, the state needs to have a very compelling interest to do so.
If someone wants to bring back the Aztec religion, build a pyramid in their suburban neighborhood, and start sacrificing people to Xipe Totec...Well, the state obviously has a clearly compelling reason to trample on that individual's religious liberty. But a law restricting lab grown meat clearly doesn't actually have a lot of rational basis behind it. The state could argue that it's trying to prevent people from being confused about what they're purchasing, but that's unlikely to hold water. If that is the rational basis cited for the law, then the obvious question will be why they simply don't require lab-grown meat to be clearly labeled as such. With proper labeling, no one will confuse lab-grown for regular meat.
I would expect to see this law challenged based on religious liberty grounds. Maybe the Sikhs will challenge it. But especially in states with broad religious liberty exemptions, I would really wonder if this law could survive a legal challenge. It really seems to just shit all over the religious liberty of people whose faith decrees that killing animals is morally wrong.
I'm not sure how that would work. They still have the right to eat everything they've been eating their whole lives. It's not possible to buy lab-grown meat anywhere, as far as I'm aware, so why would it matter at all for religious purposes?
Your idea seems a bit like banning cars with graphene batteries and then challenging it on the grounds that some people don't want to ride the bus with people of other religions.
My understanding of what you are saying seems to be rooted in the idea that this is a new development and religions existed prior to it, so religions wouldn't be impacted by something that never existed before them as there wouldn't be religious practices or beliefs surrounding something that didn't exist until recently. In theory though, can't religious practices and beliefs evolve or adapt over time? Can't new religions develop? So maybe current established religions as are practiced now aren't inherently impacted by this, but couldn't they be impacted by it? If you say that the only religions are the ones that came from thousands of years ago and they are static and don't change, then that would seemingly align with your argument, but that understanding of religion would seem to be flawed to me.
Aren't there people going to be born after this lab-grown meat does come to fruition that didn't necessarily grow up their whole lives eating other things? Granted if they're born in a place where it's banned then they wouldn't, but if they're born in a place where it wasn't and moved to a place where it was, then that line of reasoning doesn't seem to work anymore. Yeah that's 20+ years down the road, but conceptually that still breaks the reasoning.
I'm not a religious person and wasn't even raised with religion being any significant part of my childhood and I have no interest or fascination in them so I'm not an expert by any means so perhaps I'm wrong on that. I suppose if anything regulations and protections surrounding religion confuses me as a person who has had little to no religious influence that any deeply held beliefs that I have don't get the same protections because they're not considered part of an established religion.
Also from this same bill:
I'm assuming they put this in place so local municipalities can't ban electric chargers.
So, they are afraid of change in the beef industry, but are now OK with change in the automotive (oil) industry. Maybe lab grown meat needs their own Elon Musk, so these backwards thinking politicians will get on board.
Not sure, but I'm reading that part in the exact opposite manner. They want regulation of electric chargers to default to the state (so they can not put any new ones in, or make up dumb reasons or hoops to jump through to make it near impossible to install electric chargers) and then they want to make it so that individual counties or cities can't go around the state's back and install electric chargers of their own accord and with their own rules.
I agree, it's quite possible.
Sounds to me like cities are now powerless in preventing non-ev's from just straight up parking in charger spots...
Presumably any spots that are owned by a private company would still be governed like any other private property. In this case the private company could call a tow truck for anyone parking in one of these spots.
Damn, I just got done listening to the Swindled podcast yesterday on Tyson chicken too. If you want a small, but horrifying, glimpse into what these industries are like then take a listen (I warned you). Hopefully lab grown meat one day wipes out these industries.
This is just another story of politicians siding with people lining there pockets though, I'm sure.
I'm not excited about the prospect of lab-grown meat, but I'm also not a fan of this decision. Let people decide for themselves.
Why? Lab grown meat sounds to me like it has the potential to be a massive improvement in our ability to continue eating meat without ethical concerns.
I don't really have ethical concerns about meat consumption. I'm not going to belittle those that do, but it's just not a concern to me. My understanding of lab grown meat is that it's pure muscle with no fat or connective tissue. My favorite steak is a ribeye where those components are important.
I also won't pay more for it. Maybe that's not an issue in the distant future but it sure is now.
Lab grown meat or cultured meat, as a concept, may absolutely include other components than pure muscle. Consider the 2004 patent US6835390B1[1] which in its abstract notes that "The meat product may also comprise other cells such as fat cells or cartilage cells, or both, that are grown ex vivo together with the muscle cells". Consider also that at least some work is being done on culturing fat, such as in this 2023 paper[2], with the editor's note starts by saying "This paper describes an important new method to cultivate fat tissues in vitro for meat production".
I think it is fair to say that the long-term aspiration is absolutely that products made using cultured meat will be more or less indistinguishable from those made with regular meat to someone who eats it, if for no other reason that it will be easier to market. To what extent it actually will be that remains to be seen. For instance, it seems reasonable that it will be easier to reach that level of fidelity if the meat is used to make sausages than if it tries to replace the aforementioned ribeye steak.
That said, I don't think it needs to replace all meat products for the prospect of cultured meat to be potentially exciting, nor does it have to replace any specific meat product I consume. Disregarding any ethical concerns for sake of argument here, there are also pragmatic concerns which cultured meat maybe could improve, even if it only displaces a part of the regular meat market. Risk of antibiotic resistance, risk of zoonotic diseases, energy requirements, resource usage like land and water, transportation requirements, other environmental and climate impacts, etc.
Jon Vein (2004), Method for producing tissue engineered meat for consumption, US6835390B1, https://patents.google.com/patent/US6835390B1/en
John Se Kit Yuen Jr, Michael K Saad, Ning Xiang, Brigid M Barrick, Hailey DiCindio, Chunmei Li, Sabrina W Zhang, Miriam Rittenberg, Emily T Lew, Kevin Lin Zhang, Glenn Leung, Jaymie A Pietropinto, David L Kaplan (2023) Aggregating in vitro-grown adipocytes to produce macroscale cell-cultured fat tissue with tunable lipid compositions for food applications eLife 12:e82120, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82120
Now.... I can see this line of thinking about animal welfare. You're not obliged to value animal life at all.
But some of the issues around meat consumption tie directly into climate change prevention. A good chunk of global GHG emissions are attributable to food production, and e.g. beef is roughly an order of magnitude more GHG intensive than vegetarian protein.
I'm not trying to convert you to veganism here, or rejoice at the progress of lab-grown meat. I want to point out that the ethical issue is one that does (presumably) affect you - it is a concern to you. It is entirely legitimate to acknowledge the concern, and stay inactive on it, e.g. because your GHG footprint is otherwise fairly low. Or because you just don't care.
I wish the beef industry was as threatened as it thinks it is.
If they keep pumping money into conservative politicians campaigns and pushing this narrative...who knows how long it will take to make progress for our world.
What I don't get is instead of being evil why can't they just fucking evolve? See the market go more towards lab grown meat, start preparing to make your own. Oh wait, that costs money and they can't just rest on their laurels but would have to work towards changing how they did things.
You answered your own question.
It isn't easy to spend lots of money and change the way you do things when you are comfortable.
Yeah, but come on, it's not like they can not be evil and also still get their company to thrive... my last part is answering my question but it's also a sarcastic comment on how much assholes they are that they'd rather be evil (god forbid they actually have to compete rather then spend a little money and be lazy <- that was my unwritten part to that last sentence). Also... it shows how much a lie capitalism is when it claims capitalism keeps people at their best (I am not against capitalism but it needs reigns and regulations cause pure capitalism does not work as intended). Because if capitalism really worked they would evolve cause they would have to to make their company survive. but really all they have to do is find ways of holding any competition back and all it takes is having enough money (or already more money than any upcoming challengers).
Democrat or republican there is going to be a lot to clean up after a DeSantis.