Why the right wants to ban this innovation before you get to try it

Conservatives want the government to dictate what you can and cannot eat. Or so Republican policymaking increasingly suggests.

Earlier this month, Montana and Nebraska became the latest US states to ban lab-grown meat (also known as “cellular meat” or “cultivated meat”). Unlike plant-based meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger, lab-grown meat consists of actual animal tissue, but made without slaughtering animals. Instead, scientists take a sample of animal cells and feed them amino acids, salts, vitamins, and other nutrients until they grow into edible beef, pork, or poultry.

This technology isn’t yet commercially viable. You can’t buy cellular meat at a grocery store. And if you could, a serving might cost you the bulk of your savings.

Nevertheless, self-styled champions of free enterprise in Nebraska, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Wyoming have all sought to stymy the manufacture and sale of cellular meat within their borders.

Although these bans are of little immediate consequence, they’re nevertheless alarming and unconscionable. Industrial agriculture as currently practiced entails the torture of billions of sentient beings. And when forced to choose between tolerating such cruelty and forfeiting cheap bacon, nearly everyone picks the former.

Lab-grown meat faces many scientific and economic hurdles to viability. But it is nevertheless our best hope for eliminating torture from our food system. And the right’s push for prohibiting the technology is fueled by little more than paranoia, greed, and cultural grievance.

Human beings generally love the taste of flesh, and not without reason. Meat is highly nutrient-dense, providing protein and essential amino acids, as well as vitamins and minerals that can be challenging to assemble from plant-based foods. The slaughter and consumption of animals has also been a central feature of human cultures, from the Paleolithic to the present day.

Of course, for much of our species’ history, meat was scarce. Raising livestock requires more resources than cultivating wheat or rice, which has long rendered highly carnivorous diets unattainable for ordinary people. As soon as humans can afford to eat meat regularly, however, most do so: Around the world, meat consumption rises almost linearly with increases in national income.

This relationship may break down some in the wealthiest nations. Past a certain level of affluence, people seem to give more weight to environmental and medical arguments against heavy meat consumption — Germany, for example, has managed to modestly decrease its per capita meat consumption over the last decade. But even in extremely rich societies, moral or environmental arguments against meat consumption haven’t made a significant dent on people’s dietary choices.

According to Gallup’s polling, in 1999, 6 percent of Americans identified as vegetarians. By 2023, that figure had fallen to 4 percent (while an additional 1 percent of Americans identified as vegans). And other empirical research, such as studies of shoppers’ grocery purchases, comports with Gallup’s findings.

It therefore seems implausible that moral suasion alone will ever drastically swell the ranks of America’s vegetarians. Which is too bad, since the moral arguments against modern animal agriculture are incredibly strong. And it requires little philosophical sophistication to recognize as much.

Most Americans think that it is wrong to torture a dog for months and then kill it. Granted, I don’t have hard data for that claim (for some reason, Gallup and Pew have not seen fit to poll that proposition). But it seems like a reasonable assumption, given the public’s hostility to dog-fighting rings and other forms of canine abuse.

Yet the reasons why we typically consider dogs to be beings of moral worth — their capacity for bonding with humans and other members of their species, intelligence, distinct personalities, empathy, and vulnerability to suffering — also apply to pigs, among other animals raised for slaughter. Yet we tolerate the systematic torture of tens of millions of pigs each year. Male piglets are routinely castrated without anesthesia. Most sows, or female breeding pigs, meanwhile, spend their entire lives in cages so small that they cannot stretch their legs or turn around.

The scale of cruelty in meat cultivation is greater than it needs to be. But there is an inescapable trade-off between productivity and humanity in industrial agriculture. Pig farmers don’t keep sows in tiny cages because they are sadists. Rather, they do so because the less space an individual sow takes up, the more you can breed in a given amount of square footage. Minimizing the resource-intensity of meat production — and therefore its cost to consumers — generally means deprioritizing the welfare of animals.

At present, there is just no getting around the conflict between our collective appetite for meat and our common moral intuition that torturing animals by the billions is wrong. Some people resolve this tension by irrationally denying the cognitive and emotional similarity of house pets and many farmed animals. Others simply choose to become vegetarians or vegans. Many, like myself, uneasily accept that we are not prepared to fully live up to our values in this domain (while seeking to mitigate our moral culpability by citing our difficulty digesting beans and soy, or the scarcity of vegan restaurants in our area, or our family traditions, or how good carnitas tacos taste).

Maybe, eventually, my vegan colleagues will persuade me to stop eating animals and start worshipping seitan. But such conversions are unlikely to ever happen at scale. Thus, the only way to reconcile humanity’s taste for meat with its sympathy for intelligent life is to decouple animals’ flesh from their sentience. And lab-grown meat is our best hope for doing that.

Yet some conservatives see less promise than peril in cellular meat. The movement to ban the technology partly reflects crass material interests. Already alarmed by competition from plant-based milks, which now make up more than 10 percent of overall milk sales, some livestock interests have sought to nip lab-grown meat in the bud. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed his state’s ban into law last year, he was flanked by cattle ranchers.

But the GOP’s push to ban cellular meat isn’t merely about deference to moneyed interests. If conservatives’ position were solely dictated by Big Ag, they might actually support the technology. Although some farmers oppose the technology, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Meat Institute have both objected to prohibitions on its sale. Meanwhile, JBS Foods, the world’s largest meat processor, has itself invested in lab-grown beef.

Some Republican politicians say they’re motivated by safety concerns. But such objections are either ill-informed or disingenuous. To make it to market, lab-grown meat must withstand the same FDA scrutiny as the factory-farmed variety.

Ironically, what some Republicans seem to fear about lab-grown meat is precisely that it could render mass animal torture unnecessary, and therefore, verboten. As DeSantis explained when he announced his cellular meat ban last May, “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.”

The idea here is that an international cabal of billionaire progressives wants to outlaw traditional meat and make Americans eat insects and poor simulacrums of beef instead (in arguing this, DeSantis was riffing on a popular right-wing conspiracy theory about the World Economic Forum’s tyrannical machinations).

Other Republican opponents of cellular meat express similar concerns. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, himself a major pork producer, described his state’s prohibition as an effort to “battle fringe ideas and groups to defend our way of life.”

DeSantis’s conspiratorial version of this argument is patently irrational. The World Economic Forum is not trying to make you eat bugs, so as to establish a global dictatorship. But the notion that lab-grown meat could eventually lead to bans on factory-farmed animal products is less unhinged.

After all, progressives in some states and cities have banned plastic straws, despite the objective inferiority of paper ones. And the moral case for infinitesimally reducing plastic production isn’t anywhere near as strong as that for ending the mass torture of animals. So, you might reason, why wouldn’t the left forbid real hamburgers the second that a petri dish produces a pale facsimile of a quarter-pounder?

While not entirely groundless, this fear is nevertheless misguided.

Plastic straws are not as integral to American life as tasty meats. As noted above, roughly 95 percent of Americans eat meat. No municipal, state or federal government could ever end access to high-quality hot dogs, ribs, or chicken fingers and survive the next election.

The only scenario in which lab-grown meats could fully displace farmed ones is if the former comprehensively outcompetes the latter in the marketplace. If cellular meat ever becomes both tastier and cheaper than conventional alternatives — across every cut and kind of animal protein — then it could plausibly drive factory farmers into ruin. And in a world where almost no one eats pork derived from tortured sows, it’s conceivable that the government could ban such torture. In so doing, however, it would only be ratifying the market’s verdict.

It’s worth emphasizing how far-fetched that scenario is. Labs are making some progress on approximating ground beef and chicken nuggets. But manufacturing a rack of ribs or chicken wings remains wholly the stuff of science fiction. In any case, creating one serving of chicken nuggets at gargantuan cost in a lab and producing such nuggets at a global scale and competitive price are radically different propositions. And many scientists contend that cellular meat will never achieve such viability, due to the inherent constraints of thermodynamics and cell metabolism. If they are right, then conservatives have nothing to worry about.

But if those skeptical scientists are underestimating humanity’s capacity for agricultural innovation (as some have done in the past), then the consequences could be downright utopian.

Right now, the process for converting energy into animal tissue is riddled with inefficiency, environmental harms, and cruelty. We grow corn and soybeans to capture energy from the sun, then convert those crops into feed, then fatten animals on that feed for weeks, months, or years before slaughtering them. If labs found a commercially viable way to directly convert electricity into chicken wings, steaks, and bacon, we could radically reduce the resource intensity and cost of meat production. At the same time, we would free up the roughly 660 million acres of American land currently devoted to pasture and grazing — a third of the continental US — for housing, parks, or commerce, while eliminating a large share of global carbon emissions. And of course, such a technological revolution would allow carnivorous animal lovers to live our values, without forfeiting our favorite dishes.

Biology or economics may ultimately block the path to such a utopian food system. But we must not let cultural grievance prevent us from finding out if that world is possible.