Lab-grown meat is real meat, and many environmental activists tout it as a way to have your meat and eat it too, all with fewer emissions and animal deaths. But some states are looking to ban the practice altogether, citing its negative effect on agriculture and ranching industries.
Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee have passed bills targeting lab-grown meat. Florida state Rep. Tyler Sirois (R) said lab-grown meat was an "affront to nature and creation" in an interview with Politico, adding that "farming and cattle are incredibly important industries to Florida."
Others are concerned about the ethics of lab-grown meat. "Lab-grown meat or whatever you want to call it — we're not sure of all of the long-term problems with that," Rep. Danny Crawford (R) of the Alabama House of Representatives, said to Ars Technica.
If lab-grown meat is successfully banned, it could "cast doubt on the quality of the product," said Bill Winders, a sociology professor at Georgia Tech, to Fast Company. In addition, the ban could "treat cultivated meat differently than traditional meat without any actual basis in the science and any actual basis in health and safety regulations," Pepin Tuma, with the nonprofit think tank Good Food Institute, told Ars Technica. "There are plenty of foods that are not healthy for us that aren't banned. The question is: Should government be the one to come in and tell us what we can or can't eat?" | 
