“This ban is a massive win for Texas ranchers, producers, and consumers,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement following the bill’s passage. “Texans have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”
…
Texas joins Indiana, Mississippi, Montana and Nebraska in enacting new laws this year; Alabama and Florida did so last year. In March, the Oklahoma House approved a similar bill that did not advance out of the Senate this session.
As someone who is morally aware but also morally lazy and eats meat, this gives me hope that cultured meat is actually a threat to the meat industry at this point. Otherwise they’d not be making it illegal.
I 100% would replace all of my meat consumption with cultured meat as long as its reasonably umami/fatty/tastey/varied. Because I know how awful the meat industry is.
Plus it’d even be safer and healthier, especially given the destruction of food safety in this country. Little to zero communicable disease risk.
I unfortunately live in one of these prohibition states though. Just reinforces the idea that I need to get the fuck out of here, this place fucking sucks and the people here can suck shit.
To be fair, the republicans make lots of stupid shit illegal even when it’s not a threat at anything. They love virtue signaling through regulation and love creating laws that are based on conspiracy BS.
They made sharia law illegal in some places, even though there has never been the most remote chance it could come to the USA. They’re panicky fucking snowflakes. All conservatism is driven by fear.
Bathroom bills, chem trail laws. So many dumb examples of people trying to protect themselves from a boogeyman man that conservative media tells you to fear.
The shit they push is the closest anything in this country has to Sharia. That’s the irony of it all.
Well otherwise Medina ohio would absolutely have sharia law /s
Eh, I’m not nearly so optimistic. They also got terribly worked up over the word “milk” and labeling plant based burger “burger”.
It’s more about bending over backwards to protect the meat and dairy industry from facing any possible missed revenue opportunity than protecting their actual bottom line, and more importantly about demonstrating their continued utility to the industry.
Kinda like how they’ll work hard to prevent gun regulations that no one is actually proposing because the perception of the possibility of a threat is unacceptable.
I’ll side with them on the milk thing. If I want milk in a product/recipe/dish, I very, very clearly do not want the water infused-flours that they are trying to call milk. I limit dairy as much as possible, but it absolutely does not get replaced in a recipe.
The Forme of Cury, a cookbook published in 1390, mentions almond milk. There’s no “trying”, we’ve been referring to non-dairy milk as milk (Middle English: mylke) for at least 650 years.
Shakespeare mentioned “the milk of human kindness”…
Wait, what were we talking about again?
It’s a freak out because they’ve been called milks for an exceptionally long time. “Milk” has never exclusively meant the product of lactation in English. It’s always referred to something white and more opaque than not.
http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/grec31.htm
As another reply mentioned, we specifically have recipes for almond milk from before modern English.
It’s hardly a new thing, just something gaining popularity.
We have specific regulations to prevent consumers from buying the wrong thing within reason. Because most people assume milk means cow milk in the US, that’s what the standard of identity for milk refers to. We don’t need legislation specifically saying that plant milk can’t use the word because you already can’t pickup two jugs labeled “milk” and be unsure if they’re the same thing. Same as goat milk, sheep milk, milk of magnesia, 2% milk, whole milk, skim milk, vitamin D milk, lactose free milk, chocolate milk or strawberry milk.
Hell, “muscle milk” is only technically barely a milk product, absolutely isn’t milk (two milk derived proteins that using prevents a product from being labeled cheese and relegates it to “cheese product”), and would be stupendously unsuitable for cooking. No one complains about it, nor how it contains no muscle at all.
I’d find concerns of consumer protection a lot more credible if they had insisted that other animal milks couldn’t be labeled as such, or at least objected to things like “coconut water”, “rose water”, “cactus water”, “birch water”, “maple water”, “water chestnuts” or “watermelon”. Consumers are evidently only confused by plant milk though, which also prevents them from reading the name of the product. Works fine for other animal milks though, and anything that isn’t milky.
Milky way, milk thistle, milk weed, milk tree, dandelion milk… The list goes on. Oh, and don’t forget cream of wheat or tartar, for when your milky substance is also thick.
I’m sorry, but if you don’t alter the recipe to account for your chosen omission… your cooking must be absolute shite. 🥲
Milk has been used for crushed plant products with a milky consistency for millinia; longer than the English language, that’s for sure. You bought a stupid argument sold to you by the dairy industry. The word for milk from a cow is dairy, not specifically milk. Milk of magnesia, poppy milk, and all kinds of other things are called milk, and they’re not dairy substitutes, because that’s not what that word means.
You should always stop and think, and maybe do some research, before making up your mind, especially when it’s people who make money off of it trying to convince you of something.
Keep an eye on the Seattle election. If the progressive wins the race there will be a lot of gearing up for a huge influx of people. The people are expected either way but the progressive want to do something to house them and the conservatives want it all to be a surprise.
My family is interested in going international however.
Washington is where I will end up once financially stable again.
You might wanna check out those property & income tax stats, etc. first, though pretty much every state founded by those seeking to evade the long arm of the gov’t back in the day is uniquely renowned. Just gotta find the place that makes the most sense for you. ✊🏼
Absolutely. I’ve done research and already know some locations, been up there half a dozen times easy. I was supposed to already be out of my fucked up state and up there, but life got in the way.
Well then! 🤘🏼 Good on ya! Feel free to ask for pointers re: this Upper Left Coast 🤓
I don’t think it is yet, but they want laws on the book protecting them before they have money to lobby against them. They don’t want a fair fight. They want to make sure they have the upper hand before the fight even starts.
All the information I’ve been able to find is that lab-grown meat scaling to anything like the commercial meat industry is a pipe dream. At least in the current state, the industrial requirements make economies of scale impossible.
I think this is more Texas republicans giving their ranch-owning donors a meaningless gesture of fealty.
ETA: here is a link to an article with more information https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
I think that’s the key. The cost has been going down over time, it’ll get there eventually.
Its kind of like solar power. That seemed like a pipe dream for a long time as well but it just kept getting cheaper and cheaper.
This kinda feels inaccurate somehow.
Admittedly I don’t know much (anything?) about this and in the 5 minutes I’ve spent skimming articles online it’s been difficult to cut through marketing.
However, it seems like there’s people producing and commercially selling specialty synthetic meats right now.
It’s natural that initially, only specialty / expensive products will be commercially viable, and it seems like that’s where we are right now.
I will be very surprised if synthetic lab-grown pork mince is not cheaper than the real stuff in 10 years time.
The barrier here is that hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution has extremely optimized their form, and the nature of growing only the muscle cells de-optimizes the system. Animals have immune systems; lab cells have to be kept in a sterile environment, a significant cost. Animals have digestive systems and can power cell growth and all other functions from common plant materials; lab cells have to be fed pre-digested and carefully proportioned material, a significant cost. Animals have circulatory systems that efficiently perfuse oxygen and nutrients, and remove waste; lab cell containers have to be centrifuged in small containers because the forces required in large containers damage the cells. And so on.
Lab-grown cuts are sold as a luxury good now, and I expect as the price comes down from 1000x animal-grown meat to more like 10x animal-grown meat they will become more widely eaten by rich conspicuous consumers.
The real opportunity for equal-tasting, cheaper, better for the environment “meat” is development of and efficiencies gained by scaling the lines of plant-based imitations like what Impossible and it’s competitors are doing.
I’ve had impossible burger and while they’re OK tasting they’re not equal tasting. Further, after eating one I felt very strange, like my body had some sort of reaction to it.
To your point, the value I see is if this process can be used to duplicate exotic meats, that could protect some species from over-harvesting and poaching. Of course, that supposes a circumstance where the environment that produces the natural specimen is not a fundamental requirement to make the meat desirable.
You’re talking about the cost to grow boutique lab grown meat that is the same as animal meat but grown in a vat. That cost 10,000 dollars a kilogram right now.
Go taste an impossible meat burger someplace and check the price and see its only slightly more expensive than animal meat, even now in the relatively early days. Beyond meat is a 4 billion dollar company. Its a viable business model.
The law is talking about lab-grown animal protein, not vegetable derived meat substitutes like Impossible or Beyond Meat.
fair point
Same.
I will never go Vegan but if Lab Grown Meat becomes an option I’ll do that.
If you leave then it will always remain shit, kind of the only thing keeping me in the states as a whole. Volunteer for parties who oppose Republicans, whoever has the best chance of winning. Go door to door. Talk with people like real people, change their minds.
I get the motivation to try and stay around and make things better but I’m well past that. I’ve been trying to change minds for a while, I can only assume I’m just bad at it.
I also don’t really owe this place my time and energy. If people in this state want to wallow in shit that’s their prerogative but I’m not getting pulled into that shit if I can avoid it. Though it looks like economically I wont be able to avoid it. Moving is expensive and if I move I’ll need a new job and the job market is terrible right now.
What’s so dumb is that there is more than enough money sloshing around in the industries associated with the SAD to probably buy into cultured meat and profit anyway…