There is nothing like a banned food that makes us more curious about it. Sometimes it makes it more attractive to attain.
Some bans are due to the endangered nature of the ingredients, like endangered sea turtles, beluga caviar, and queen conch. Or it’s due to potential risks to human consumption, like the puffer fish, raw ackee fruit, and Kinder surprise eggs (with a toy inside). Or there’s a disease risk, like haggis, due to risks of scrapies from sheep lung in the classic Robert Burns Night dish. Other bans are due to concerns of animal cruelty, like with horse meat or shark fins.
There’s an addition to that list this year, as “cultivated” meat, or lab-grown meat—which is grown from animal stem cells—got the ban hammer in Florida. Other states, such as Alabama, Arizona, and Tennessee, have similar bans on cooking.
The ban doesn’t impact manufactured meat substitutes derived from plants, like tofu-based meat substitutes or Impossible burgers.
Recently, Upside Foods, a start-up working to commercialize cultivated meat, sued to block the ban. So, what is lab-grown meat?
Scientists from the University of Maastricht in Netherlands were the first to create a lab-grown meat designed for human consumption. A hamburger costing more than $300,000 was presented in 2013; the cost was later reduced to around $11 in a few years. The FDA first approved it for U.S. sales in 2023. Also in 2023, the Orthodox Union certified a strain of lab-grown poultry meat as kosher Mehadrin meat, a first in the world.
The cultured meat is grown from animal stem cells. The cells are submerged in a stainless-steel vat of nutrient-rich broth for them to grow and divide. After a few weeks, there is enough protein to harvest. Currently, the food scientists mix the meat and press it into nugget or culet shapes for sale.
For now, lab-grown meat can only be found in a few limited locations, like Bar Crenn, a Michelin-starred eatery in San Francisco, and a Jose Andres restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s not yet widely available.
The objective of the cultivated meat industry is to reduce the environmental impact of meat production, and to be a more sustainable option for the industry. That is a promise not yet proven. The presumption is that when mass-production scale is achieved, it will reduce the land and water use compared to traditional ranching methods.
For those concerned with animal welfare, lab-grown meat introduces a new dimension. A recent poll suggests that half of vegetarians would still prefer to avoid it. Among the total population, the poll suggests about two-thirds will give lab-grown meat a try.
As society and government try to process the emergence of lab-grown meat, the fledgling industry proclaims the meat as the “safest, best protein on the planet,” as the growing methods avoid contamination due to the pathogens and antibiotics that are common in current methods.
It is also conceivable, in the future, that meat from endangered animals, such as bluefin tuna, can be grown in the lab and reduce the stress on wild populations.
For now, growing and selling cultivated meat is a crime in Florida, except for NASA and the space industry, which have been studying cultivated meat for long-term space missions.
Dean Black, a cattle rancher and Florida representative who supported the bill’s passage, stated concerns of national security, as concentrated protein production may lead to attack. And with the ban, the state hopes to protect “the integrity of American agriculture,” according to Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson. Gov. Ron DeSantis, in his statement, raised concern about the “global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish.”
Others in the legislature were against the bill, such as our local state representative, Rep. Christine Hunschofsky. She called it a “food fight” and said that it “sends a bad message” to both researchers and businesses who are trying to grow a nascent industry.
Even though the FDA approved the lab-grown meats as safe, it doesn’t mean that they’re healthy. We’ve learned this from studies showing that ultra-processed foods have negative health implications. Even if the ingredients that go into ultra-processed foods are all safe, it’s better to eat minimally processed options. The new industry is still working to show that the micronutrients you find in your grocery store meat are present in the lab-grown variety.
So the jury is still out on the new culinary frontier, but early reviewers who have tried the cultured meat have given it good reviews. An Associated Press reviewer, who tried a cultured chicken, commented that it “tastes like chicken.”