On this day in vegan history · May 1, 2024
Florida Outlaws the Sale of Lab-Grown Meat
A year after federal regulators cleared cultivated chicken for American plates, Florida made selling it a crime instead.
The facts
- Signed
- May 1, 2024, at the Hardee County Cattlemen's Arena in Wauchula, Florida
- The law
- SB 1084 took effect July 1, 2024, making the sale or manufacture of cultivated meat a second-degree misdemeanor
- First of its kind
- Florida was the first U.S. state to ban cultivated meat sales; six more states have since followed, including Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas
On May 1, 2024, Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 1084 at the Hardee County Cattlemen's Arena in Wauchula, making Florida the first U.S. state to ban the manufacture and sale of cultivated meat. The law arrived about a year after federal regulators cleared lab-grown chicken for sale in the United States, and before any cultivated meat product had actually gone on sale in Florida itself. DeSantis cast the ban as a stand against 'the global elite,' while the state's cattle industry got a future competitor shut out before it reached a single cooler. Cultivated meat companies warned the law would only hand the market to producers overseas.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Today, 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.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, on signing SB 1084, May 1, 2024
Source: Reason -
Far from protecting American jobs, banning cultivated seafood in the United States will deepen our country's dependence on imports from countries like China.
Justin Kolbeck, co-founder of Wildtype, testifying to a Florida House committee before the bill passed
Source: CF Public
Why it still matters
It proved a food almost nobody had eaten yet could still become a culture-war target, and it gave other statehouses a working template: five more states passed their own cultivated meat bans within two years.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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