Cultivated Meat Bans Aren’t About Safety — They’re About Control
When people finally got to try cultivated meat for themselves, the result wasn’t horror or disgust — it was opposition to banning it.
A peer-reviewed study from Tufts University, published in npj Science of Food, followed a public tasting event in Florida hosted by UPSIDE Foods — one of the first companies approved to sell cultivated meat in the US. The event happened just before Governor Ron DeSantis pushed through a state-wide ban on its sale and production.
The outcome? A majority of attendees — regardless of political leaning — opposed the ban. Even in a state obsessed with “small government,” people recognised it for what it was: a stunt. Not public safety. Not food standards. Just political theatre propping up an industry afraid of competition.
“We don’t ban foods in America,” said one participant. “This isn’t Four Loko. There’s no science behind the ban. It’s nonsense.”
Fear is profitable
Animal agriculture knows its days are numbered — not because of ethics, but because its methods are finally being exposed. Cultivated meat is just one crack in the system. A method of growing animal flesh without farming entire animals is a threat to a business model built on forced breeding, mutilation, and mass killing. So instead of adapting, they’re lobbying for bans.
Alabama and Mississippi have followed Florida. South Dakota, Nebraska, and Arizona may be next.
This isn’t a debate about flavour, it’s a fight over resources — and the animal agriculture lobby doesn’t want to give up its stranglehold.
Herbivore Club’s position
We don’t endorse cultivated meat — it’s ethically inferior to plant-based alternatives and entrenches the idea that humans need to consume animal flesh at all. It's reducing violence rather than rejecting it.
But we’re not here to defend bans either. Preventing innovation that innovation reduces the number of animals being bred, confined, and killed is a desperate attempt to slow inevitable change.
We stay fairly neutral on cultivated meat at this point in history, because while it’s not the solution, it’s clearly better than what it's replacing.
Not about safety. Not about science. Not about choice.
The public remains misinformed — not just about cultivated meat, but about the horrors of the industry it might one day replace. And that’s exactly how the meat industry wants it. Keep people confused, keep alternatives banned, and keep pretending this is about “freedom.”
Banning cultivated meat doesn’t protect anyone — it protects profits.
If people are going to eat flesh, it’s at least worth asking whether it needs to come from a body. But no one in power wants you to ask that. They just want you to keep eating, keep buying, and stop thinking.
Herbivore Club maintains that the future is plant-based. But we’ll always challenge dishonest, supremacist systems that stand in the way of progress — even if that progress is imperfect.