The Mississippi Home of Representatives simply handed a invoice banning cultivated meat. This makes Mississippi the third state to outlaw meat grown in vats from small samples of animal cells.
The Mississippi invoice will make it unlawful for anybody to fabricate, promote, or distribute cultivated meat within the state. Violating the legislation could be a misdemeanour, punishable by a positive of not more than $500 and/or as much as three months in county jail. Related legal guidelines handed final yr in Florida and Alabama additionally carry potential jail phrases or fines of as much as $500.
The invoice now awaits the signature of Governor Tate Reeves and can grow to be legislation until he chooses to veto the invoice. Mississippi’s agriculture commissioner, Andy Gipson, has criticized the cultivated meat business, and he supported a 2019 invoice that prevented cultivated meat merchandise being labeled as meat within the state. In 2024 he revealed a publish on his web site that recommended the cultivated meat bans in Florida and Alabama. “I need my steak to come back from farm-raised beef, not a petri-dish from a lab,” he wrote.
“This has a really, very, robust sense of political theater,” says Suzi Gerber, govt director of the Affiliation for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, a commerce group representing the cultivated meat business. The precise influence of the legislation in any of those states could be minimal, she says, since cultivated meat hasn’t been accessible on the market in any of them.
Republican representatives Invoice Pigott and Lester Carpenter launched the Mississippi invoice in January 2025. It handed each homes with no single vote in opposition. However comparable laws in different states has had much less of a easy path. A Wyoming invoice that might have outlawed cultivated meat was voted down in its third studying within the senate in February, whereas an identical invoice proposed in South Dakota additionally did not make it by way of a senate vote in February.
“I used to be stunned however inspired by the leads to these states,” says Gerber. In Wyoming some senators argued for higher packaging and labeling provisions as an alternative of an outright ban on cultivated meat, whereas in South Dakota some legislators opposed the ban, arguing it might inhibit free commerce.
Different states are contemplating laws just like that already handed in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. A invoice launched in Georgia in January would make it unlawful to promote cultivated meat. In Nebraska a invoice that might prohibit cultivated meat within the state was launched on the request of Governor Jim Pillen in January.
The Florida ban is at present being contested in a court docket case introduced by the Californian cultivated meat agency Upside Meals and the Institute of Justice, a nonprofit public curiosity legislation agency. The case argues that the Florida ban violates two separate elements of the US Structure, which cowl interstate commerce and the connection between federal and state legislation. In October a federal decide denied Upside Meals’ request for a preliminary injunction that might have halted the enforcement of Florida’s ban on cultivated meat.
The regular drip of state bans has coincided with a downturn in investor enthusiasm for cultivated meat. Simply $226 million was invested in cultivated meat startups in 2023, considerably down from $922 million in 2022. In early 2024 Upside Meals laid off employees, whereas California-based SciFiFoods shut down altogether later that yr.
However there are some indicators that the business is weathering these headwinds. On March 8, San Francisco–based mostly cultivated meat firm Mission Barns introduced that the Meals and Drug Administration had no additional questions concerning the security of its cultivated pork fats product, a serious step towards promoting the product within the US. Solely two different corporations, Upside Meals and Eat Simply, have obtained an identical letter from the FDA. Now Mission Barns solely wants approval from the US Division of Agriculture so as to launch within the US.
