Texas Banned Lab-Grown Meat. But Is the Trend a Real Threat to the Industry?

Cultivated meat, colloquially known as lab-grown meat, is still a long way from hitting grocery stores, but that hasn’t stopped legislatures around the country from preemptively outlawing it. The most recent place to do so is Texas, which in June became the seventh state to prohibit the sale of lab-grown meat within its borders. But why are so many states banning something that hasn’t even been released yet, and is the trend a real threat to the burgeoning industry?

“I think most of this is driven by producers who are worried about competition,” meat industry veteran Barry Carpenter tells Sentient of the lab-grown meat bans. “I think that’s an erroneous concern, but when people feel like they’re being challenged, or there’s a risk of somehow affecting their livelihood, they get concerned.”

Carpenter spent 10 years as CEO and President of the North American Meat Institute, a trade organization dedicated to promoting the consumption of traditional meat, and was inducted into the Meat Hall of Fame in 2013. Despite his time in the industry, he vehemently opposes bans on lab-grown meat, arguing that they restrict consumer choice.

Lab-grown meat is created by extracting a cell from a living animal, combining it with a specially formulated mix of nutrients and allowing it to grow in a bioreactor. The result is real, bona fide meat that’s produced without slaughtering billions of animals.

Lab-grown meat has the potential to significantly reduce animal suffering and environmental destruction, both of which are widespread in the traditional meat industry, and could play an important role in feeding the world’s growing population over the next several decades.

But the technology behind lab-grown meat is still under development. The process used to create it is still much too expensive to be scaled to widespread commercial capacity, although it’s inching towards becoming more affordable as research continues; as of this writing, lab-grown meat is sold at no grocery stores and only one restaurant in the United States.

Despite its potential, cultivated meat has also attracted ample controversy, and these state bans are just one symptom of that. But what exactly is the beef, so to speak? Let’s take a closer look.

What Does the Texas Law Do?

Texas’s law contains two provisions. The first bans the sale of all lab-grown proteins in the state for a period of two years beginning in September 2025, while the second creates strict labeling requirements for lab-grown proteins. The second provision will be applicable if lab-grown meat hits shelves after the ban expires.

Although six other states have banned lab-grow meat, Texas is only the second, after Indiana, to put an expiration date on its ban. The Texas legislation doesn’t specify any reason for this, but in Indiana, lawmakers said that the two-year ban would give researchers time to study the health impacts of lab-grown meat before it hits shelves.

Some have also speculated that putting a two-year deadline on the ban might make the states less susceptible to a lawsuit; Florida, which enacted a permanent ban on lab-grown meat in 2024, is currently being sued over its law.

In addition to the three aforementioned states, lab-grown meat has also been banned in Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska and Alabama, none of which have ever sold lab-grown meat in any capacity.

A little over a year ago, Florida became the first state to ban lab-grown meat. Alabama followed suit a week later, and lawmakers in several other states gradually introduced similar bans. Some of them failed, but many passed, and now, seven states have enacted laws prohibiting the sale of lab-grown meat.

What’s the Impact of Cultivated Meat Bans?

Despite the spread of these laws, their actual impact has been practically non-existent. Lab-grown meat has never been sold in U.S. grocery stores, and the only restaurant in the country that currently serves it is in Oregon, which hasn’t enacted any bans on the product.

But the Texas law will soon have a real-world impact, albeit a limited one: In June, the cultivated seafood company Wildtype announced that OTOKO, an upscale Japanese restaurant in Austin, would begin serving lab-grown salmon starting in mid-July. But once the law takes effect in September, this will be illegal.

A representative from Wildtype tells Sentient that OTOKO will stop serving cultivated salmon before September 1 in order to be in compliance with the Texas law.

“It’s unfortunate that special interests and big lobbies are stripping Texans of their right to choose American seafood made by an American small business in a country that imports 80-90 percent of its seafood from overseas,” the Wildtype representative added.

It’s too soon to give even a rough estimate of when lab-grown meat will be available in a widespread capacity. A 2021 analysis by McKinsey concluded that by 2030, cultivated meat could potentially reach cost parity with traditional meat, and capture as much as half of one percent, or $25 billion, of the global meat market. However, many analysts now see this as far too optimistic. It would require significant funds for research and development, but investments in lab-grown meat firms have instead fallen in recent years.

Still, the industry does continue to make small inroads. In 2024, Singapore became the first country in the world to sell frozen lab-grown meat in a retail capacity.

What’s at Stake

Lab-grown meat was devised to address several problems with traditional meat: the damage it inflicts on the environment, the pain it inflicts on animals and concerns over potential protein shortages over the next several decades.

It’s estimated that up to 20 percent of all global greenhouse gasses are the result of meat production, and beef, soy and palm oil are the largest drivers of deforestation worldwide. Animal agriculture takes a heavy toll on animals as well, as livestock live out their lives in cramped and unsanitary facilities, often without enough space to stand up or turn around.

In addition, the planet is quickly running out of land on which to expand factory farming, and there’s increasing concern that our existing food systems won’t be able to meet the protein needs of the Earth’s growing population. Lab-grown meat is in a position to help address this problem.

“There is quite literally not enough arable land and water to be able to feed the entire population by 2050 with just conventional animal agriculture,” Tamar Lieberman, legislative specialist at the Good Food Institute, a group that advocates for alternative proteins, tells Sentient. “We need additional solutions to be able to fill that protein gap.”

Why Do Some People Want to Ban Lab-Grown Meat?

There’s no evidence that lab-grown meat is unsafe or unhealthy, nor that it’s a business threat to the massive global meat industry. Yet the arguments against lab-grown meat generally center on either the health impacts of the product or the economic impacts on traditional meat producers.

Health Concerns

As Carpenter and Lieberman both point out, lab-grown meat has been approved for sale by both the FDA and the USDA, which is no small feat. Moreover, the fact that it’s created with petri dishes and 3D printers in sterile laboratories suggests it’s less susceptible to the infectious diseases that commonly spread on animal farms, such as E.coli and bird flu.

“Conventional meat might have a lot more hazards in terms of pathogens, parasites, and any kind of contaminant,” food scientist Bryan Quoc Le tells Sentient. “A cell-based product is going to have gone through a very rigorous process of sterilization, and maintaining the environment in which it’s grown. You can’t say the same thing about conventional meat, where a cow is basically living in its own filth.”

Meat Industry Profits

Carpenter believes that the professed concerns over lab-grown meat’s health impacts are “just a smokescreen” for the meat industry’s concerns about losing their market share.

“I think it’s just being used as a lever for those people who just don’t want competition for their product,” he says.

Lieberman agrees, telling Sentient that she sees the lab-grown meat bans as “a clear protectionist effort” on the part of traditional meat producers.

“There’s a legacy industry that’s extremely strong in a lot of states,” Lieberman says. “I think a lot of some of these legislators have introduced bills to ban cultivated meat because they thought that it would be appreciated by the legacy conventional meat industry.”

But both Carpenter and Lieberman think these fears are overblown, at least at this point. The idea that lab-grown meat, which is only being sold at a single U.S. location in Oregon, is in a position to challenge conventional meat’s share of the protein market is “certainly not a realistic concern,” Carpenter says.

“It is clearly not a threat to their market share,” Lieberman says. “It’s not yet on grocery store shelves.”

Cultural Signaling

Meat consumption is deeply embedded in American culture. Long associated with American patriotism and masculinity, meat has also been declared trendy again by food writers.

With modern-day conservatism’s fixation on manhood and reverence of America’s past, lab-grown meat is also a culture war issue, with opposition to it serving as a signifier of allegiance to conservative values. It’s notable that every state to ban lab-grown meat has a conservative governor (though Democratic Senator John Fetterman is also on board).

Opponents have also made some less-than-serious arguments against lab-grown meat, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s erroneous claim that “global elites” will “force the world” to eat it against their will (they won’t). Fear-mongering like this is better understood as a pseudo-populist attempt to gin up opposition to lab-grown meat than a substantive argument against it.

The Bottom Line

Despite the rapid pace at which some states are banning lab-grown meat, the technology itself is still years away from commercial viability, let alone widespread availability. Cultivated meat has only recently begun to clear regulatory hurdles at the federal level, and current production remains extremely limited and expensive.

Nevertheless, there’s been a flurry of legislative activity aimed at preemptively outlawing these products, and while lawmakers often justify this on public health grounds, there’s no evidence that lab-grown meat is unsafe or unhealthy. This disconnect suggests a deeper anxiety among defenders of traditional meat, for whom the very idea of cultivated, non-animal protein is a threat.

Whether or not these bans have any significant long-term impact on the lab-grown meat industry’s growth remains to be seen, but much will depend on the outcome of current and future lawsuits over the policy. UPSIDE Foods, a lab-grown meat company, sued Florida over its ban shortly after it was passed; that lawsuit is still pending, and there will almost certainly be more legal action around lab-grown meat bans in the years to come.

The fight over cultivated meat is a long way from being over, and it isn’t just about science or safety. It’s about the future of food production, the protein needs of our growing population and who gets to control what we eat.