Lab-grown meat might be about to meet its maker

Lab-grown meat is real meat. It is created through a cell culture from a real animal. "Unlike plant-based meat, it's not vegan but a sustainable replacement for carnivores that eliminates the need to rear and slaughter animals," said Fast Company. Many environmental activists tout lab-grown meat as a way to have your meat and eat it too, all with less emissions and animal deaths. But some states are looking to ban the practice altogether, citing its negative effect on the agriculture and ranching industries. 

Steak minus the slaughter

The agricultural industry accounts for close to 11% of the United States' greenhouse gas emissions, per the Department of Agriculture. This includes emissions from the cultivation of livestock. Livestock specifically releases high levels of methane, a greenhouse gas approximately 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Because of the environmental implications, lab-grown meat has been proposed as a solution, one that allows for meat consumption without livestock cultivation and slaughter. 

Not everybody is on board. Some states, including Florida, Alabama, Arizona and Tennessee, are attempting to pass 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." Many of the state bills have pointed to the economical importance of livestock farming. "The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America's dominant source of protein," said Vox.

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Some 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 lawmakers in a hearing. "Cell-cultured meat products are so new that there's not really a framework for how state and federal labeling will work together," said Rusty Rumley, an attorney with the National Agricultural Law Center, to Inside Climate News. 

Doubt and delusion

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, said in a hearing in opposition to the ban. "There are plenty of foods that are not healthy for us that aren't banned," Tuma said. "The question is: Should government be the one to come in and tell us what we can or can't eat?"

There is also a general wariness of the new science. "I think it raises important ethical concerns about the limitations and boundaries we should place on this type of science," Sirois said. "I think you could see a very slippery slope here leading to things like cloning, which are very troubling to me." Still, said Inside Climate News, "while plant-based meat substitutes are widespread, cell-cultivated meats are not widely available, with none currently being sold in stores." For now, the uproar might be putting the cart before the cow.