F lorida governor Ron DeSantis and Alabama governor Kay Ivey have banned the sale of lab-grown meat in their states. Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman denounced the “Pro-Bio Slop” caucus in a statement supporting DeSantis. Other states, such as Tennessee, Alabama, and Arizona, are considering similar legislation. The slightly conspiratorial edge in Fetterman’s rhetoric is shared by the defenders of beef and pork raised the old-fashioned way, from animals. When DeSantis signed his bill he said, “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.”
Immediately, DeSantis was denounced for betraying conservative principles, and indulging in paranoia and fueling conspiracy theories. National Review’s editorial says that DeSantis has taken “the cause of individual choice — and sullied it with an unlovely combination of hypocrisy and two-bit protectionism.”
DeSantis is right, and his critics are wrong. First, let’s start with the protectionism, and then get on to the global plot.
NR’s editorial simply passes over the current state of the market for meat. It’s not like the market for pencils, in which more or less every firm is competing on quality of the product and the marketing. Agriculture is subject to lots of existing protection and regulation for reasons that are mostly uncontroversial, not just for safety but also for security. After dueling naval blockades in World War I, in which three-quarters of a million Germans died of starvation, most advanced nations implemented policies to subsidize at least some local food production so that they were not abjectly dependent on foreign trade, which can be interrupted during a geopolitical crisis.
Lab-grown meat is not entering into this market as just another entrepreneurial endeavor — it is loading up with its own lobbyists.
From Politico:
The companies, whose cultivated chicken is now on the menu at restaurants in D.C. and San Francisco, say venture capital money won’t be enough. Now, well before it’s clear whether Americans want to give up traditional hamburgers, they’re jumping into Washington’s influence ecosystem and pressing Congress to expand their access to public financing from the Agriculture Department.
A research professor helpfully explains to Politico, “The industry’s pitch to lawmakers can be a persuasive one that ties in morality, sustainability and global food security.” In other words, the industry’s predicted growth isn’t about market forces at all; it’s fundamentally a utopian vision of humanity living in a different way. And as we will shortly see, that’s necessarily going to require compulsion.
Lab-meat enthusiasts simply imagine scientific breakthroughs in the industry that may not even be possible. Even their utilitarian case requires believing that lab-grown meat will have fewer negative externalities on the environment. So far, the research shows that lab-grown alternative meat has a worse carbon footprint than real meat. That’s not surprising. Scientists have no idea how to get the lab-grown meat to move itself, the way animal muscles do, a necessary part of creating the texture meat-eaters expect. On the other side, there’s no cleaner source of fuel than what’s found in traditional cattle ranching: solar power driving photosynthesis, which provides the grass or corn or other inputs to the cellular division and organic growth of a living creature whose body is fine-tuned by evolution to make the most of every consumed calorie of energy. But even if lab meat continues to be worse for the environment, utopians still have a reason to push it.
Luke Hallam at the Unpopulist denounces the lab-meat bans as products of Hofstadter-esque politics — the fruit of paranoia. He says there is no plan to force people to eat lab-grown meat or bugs for protein. “The idea that there is such a plan is redolent of similar conspiracy theories spread by politicians on the European far right, especially in the Netherlands,” he writes.
In fact, there are people who want to force you to eat lab-grown meat. PETA is manned by activist vegans who analogize normal human consumption of animal protein to the Holocaust. Bill Gates, one of the major investors in lab-grown meat, urges that “all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic meat.”
And just look at the editorials after DeSantis’s action. Arthur L. Caplan and Jeff Sebo wrote, “Florida just picked the wrong kind of meat to ban.” The authors start by nodding to some free-market pablum and clichés. “New agricultural industries should be free to compete against the status quo,” they write. “Talk of bans is akin to the buggy whip industry trying to ban cars in a fit of Luddite protectionism.”
This is entirely insincere. They immediately go on to argue for massive government subsidies to “develop better alternatives to the practice of breeding, raising and killing tens of billions of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish and other animals per year.” Then they show their real hand:
The production of cell-cultivated meat, plant-based meat and other such alternatives is nowhere near harmful enough to warrant a ban. Ironically, however, industrial animal agriculture is. It inflicts an enormous amount of harm on everyone whether we participate or not.
They then go on to predict not an overnight ban of industrial agriculture in favor of synthetic proteins, but a decades-long phaseout, led by government. On the one hand, it will grant subsidies to BioSlop, and on the other, it will keep tightening environmental, health, and other restrictions to make traditional meat noncompetitive.
At the bottom of this project is the morally incoherent but zealous conviction of veganism. While many people understand and can to some degree sympathize with particular objections to industrial agriculture, the moral case for veganism relies on a logically unjustifiable two-step. At first, vegans will insist that animals have rights that cannot be traduced to satisfy mere human wants, and therefore killing animals and consuming them is always and everywhere wrong. But vegans still eat other agricultural products, and producing those necessarily involves the violation of animal rights — the seizure of animal habitats, the destruction of “pests,” and even the collateral deaths of animals torn apart by the machines that harvest crops. When this moral problem is presented, vegans temporarily abandon their rights argument for a “harm reduction” argument, explaining that we can still choose methods of raising food that reduce harm to animals. What’s missing from the argument is any logical or coherent reason why we must choose exactly the amount and type of harm reduction favored by vegans, rather than simply raising cattle, chickens, or pork with slightly more consideration for the health of the animals.
Arguments against DeSantis’s ban on lab-grown meat often assume that there is some principle of practical reciprocity at work. That’s what NR’s editorial means by its charge of “hypocrisy.” It’s the charge that you’re banning one equally valid form of protein consumption for another. And that if we abandon that principle, we are defenseless against others who would ban the form of protein we just happen to like.
We know it doesn’t work this way. As Caplan and Sebo make clear, the principle of freedom of choice matters to lab-meat enthusiasts only so long as it works in favor of lab meat, and it will be abandoned the moment they can establish their utopia. We don’t share a commitment to freedom with them, and appealing to it as a shared principle is just deluding ourselves from the more substantive debates at hand.
Precisely because this is moral zealotry, and a political imperative that transcends other commitments, the “industry” of lab meat is going to be bolstered not just by private philanthropy but by faked-up science. The time to resist is now.
In such a situation, it’s perfectly rational for state governments to use their just powers of legislation to defend their ranchers and producers from the attack on the market launched by other government and philanthropic actors. We’re also allowed to use our God-given intellects and distinguish between food sources that humans have relied on for the entirety of our existence as a species, and a passing religious enthusiasm that seeks to reorder nature and our way of life in the name of abstract theories of multi-species egalitarianism. Our prejudice for the former is rational. It’s perfectly reasonable to use the law to protect ranching from Bill Gates and PETA.