The Mississippi House 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 can be a misdemeanour, punishable by a wonderful of not more than $500 and/or as much as three months in county jail. Similar legal guidelines handed final 12 months 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 develop into 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 submit on his web site that counseled the cultivated meat bans in Florida and Alabama. “I want my steak to come from farm-raised beef, not a petri-dish from a lab,” he wrote.
“This has a very, very, strong sense of political theater,” says Suzi Gerber, govt director of the Association 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 can be minimal, she says, since cultivated meat hasn’t been accessible on the market in any of them.
Republican representatives Bill Pigott and Lester Carpenter launched the Mississippi invoice in January 2025. It handed each homes and not using a single vote in opposition. But comparable laws in different states has had much less of a clean path. A Wyoming invoice that will have outlawed cultivated meat was voted down in its third studying within the senate in February, whereas an analogous invoice proposed in South Dakota additionally did not make it by way of a senate vote in February.
“I was surprised but encouraged by the results in those states,” says Gerber. In Wyoming some senators argued for higher packaging and labeling provisions as a substitute of an outright ban on cultivated meat, whereas in South Dakota some legislators opposed the ban, arguing it could inhibit free commerce.
Other 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 will 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 courtroom case introduced by the Californian cultivated meat agency Upside Foods and the Institute of Justice, a nonprofit public curiosity legislation agency. The case argues that the Florida ban violates two separate components of the US Constitution, which cowl interstate commerce and the connection between federal and state legislation. In October a federal choose denied Upside Foods’ request for a preliminary injunction that will 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. Just $226 million was invested in cultivated meat startups in 2023, considerably down from $922 million in 2022. In early 2024 Upside Foods laid off staff, whereas California-based SciFiFoods shut down altogether later that 12 months.
But there are some indicators that the business is weathering these headwinds. On March 8, San Francisco–primarily based cultivated meat firm Mission Barns introduced that the Food and Drug Administration had no additional questions in regards to the security of its cultivated pork fats product, a significant step towards promoting the product within the US. Only two different firms, Upside Foods and Eat Just, have acquired an analogous letter from the FDA. Now Mission Barns solely wants approval from the US Department of Agriculture with the intention to launch within the US.