States are trying to ban lab-grown meat. It’s a dumb mistake.

Republican lawmakers in Florida and Alabama may not seem like they’d have much in common with policymakers in Rome and Paris. But some elected officials in these Southern states appear to think that Italy and France are good models to emulate when it comes to taking away consumers’ freedom to buy the types of food they want to enjoy.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is one of these Republican proponents of government intervention into what Americans choose to eat, recently endorsing a ban on the sale of real meat grown from animal cells, even though such meat is FDA-approved as safe. The governor is following in Italy’s and France’s steps to squelch more efficient means of food production.

Despite the fact that meat grown from animal cells — called cultivated meat — isn’t yet sold in Florida or Alabama, its recent approval by the Food and Drug Administration has some in Tallahassee and Montgomery spooked enough that they’ve introduced legislation to ban its sale altogether. The hysteria now extends even to Washington, where a bill was just introduced in Congress to ban cultivated meat from school lunches.

Cultivated meat is not a plant-based alternative to animal meat. It’s real, actual animal meat, only it is grown from animal cells rather than animal slaughter. Two startups, Eat Just and Upside Foods, are now approved to sell their cultivated chicken in the U.S., each having undergone stringent safety testing reviewed by the FDA. 

Republican state Rep. Tyler Sirois’s legislation would make it a criminal offense to sell such meat in Florida. He claims that this technology is an “affront to nature and creation.” Gov. DeSantis goes further, objecting that ”You need meat, okay? We’re going to have meat in Florida. Like, we’re not going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.”

In truth, Sirois and DeSantis seem less concerned about insulting nature and creation than they are about protecting cattlemen from competition. Sirois defended his bill by telling Politico: “Farming and cattle are incredibly important industries to Florida.” 

As conventional meat consumption continues to rise around the globe, with the associated deforestation, skyrocketing emissions, and ravenous water use that comes with producing meat from animals, the search for sustainable alternatives is on. After all, study after study shows we need to raise fewer animals for food if we want to feed humanity without destroying our planet in the process. Unsurprisingly, peer-reviewed life cycle analyses show that if cultivated meat startups succeed, they could dramatically slash the environmental footprint of meat production.

But that will take time. While plant-based meat has already made it onto fast food menus, we’re still a long way from seeing cultivated meat show up grocery shelves, due to the industry’s lack of scale. Yet the progress toward a slaughter-free meat industry is slowly unfolding.

Already, many of the biggest meat companies have invested in alt-meat, and the world’s largest meat producer is actively building its own meat cultivation factory right now. Another meat-industry-backed start-up has already commenced construction of a commercial-scale meat cultivation factory in North Carolina. It’s clear that if America wants to remain the “meat basket” to the world, such innovation should be kept on-shore rather than allow Asia to dominate this field as it has with clean energy technologies like solar panels and wind turbines. 

DeSantis and other like-minded policy-makers seeking to deny Americans the freedom to choose the meat they can eat may see a threat from innovative entrepreneurs working to bring cultivated meat to market. But those committed to a free market should ask if it’s really the state’s role to stamp out entrepreneurial competition to ensure incumbent industries always win. 

Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic should — at a minimum — not stand in the way of such efforts to improve agricultural efficiency. Rather, they should be helping to foster it, so that the U.S. can remain a leader in food production worldwide.

Paul Shapiro is the author of “Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World” and the CEO of The Better Meat Co.