Banning lab-grown meat is stupid

Progress is good

If you want an example of why I am fundamentally out of sympathy with the American conservative movement, Montana banning the manufacture or sale of lab-grown meat is a good one.

When Ron DeSantis did this last year, I thought it was perhaps eccentricity on his part, just him being a little extra on the culture war to try to keep himself relevant. But Alabama and Mississippi have now banned lab-grown meat, and the state legislature in Nebraska is considering a bill to do the same. There’s a little network of ranch-themed media promoting this, while the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is pushing the FDA for a regulatory crackdown on the use of terms like “plant-based meat” in marketing.

Part of what I find crazy about this is that as the NCBA’s press release says, after a big initial wave of hype, the sale of Impossible and Beyond meat substitutes really does seem to have crashed.

An Impossible Burger is, if you’ve never had one, surprisingly good, considering there’s no meat in it. But to many of us who consume meat, it’s definitely worse than a regular burger. If any one of these plant-based meats had made rapid iterative progress after its release, it would be a world-beating product. But instead, the reaction is generally still something more like, “Wow, I’m impressed by how close they came!” And then you (or at least I) just want to eat a regular burger.

And that’s too bad.

If someone did figure out how to make a really tasty burger out of pea protein, that would be incredible. It obviously wouldn’t be incredible news for people who own and manage ranches. But that’s capitalism, baby. The tide of progress sweeps us all forward.

Similarly, lab-grown meat to a first approximation doesn’t exist. It can be done, but there is not a commercially viable product here to be banned, and it’s quite plausible there never will be.

And that’s too bad.

Because, again, it would be really cool if we could manufacture meat without raising and slaughtering live animals. That’s just like obviously, fundamentally true. If we could make meat in factories instead of in factory farms, there would be less cruelty in the world. There would be less need for ranch land and pasture. We could have more land set aside for recreation and pure conservation, plus more land available for housing and commerce.

Meat is way too popular to do away with by fiat. The sort of thinking that drives articles like this one from Vox, saying it would be good to convince everyone to eat beans instead reflects the habits of mind that annoy me about progressives. But if you could grow meat in a lab in a cost-effective way, that would, in fact, solve a ton of problems in a way that “just eat beans” does not. And to preemptively ban a basically hypothetical — but potentially utopian — product because free markets and personal liberty matter less than cultural posturing is appalling.

The utopian vision

Human progress over the long run is all about using resources more intensively.