Toxic Exposures
Producer of Lab-grown Chicken Sues Florida Over Ban on Cultivated Meat
California-based Upside Foods alleges the ban violates the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy and Commerce clauses and two federal laws regulating the inspection and distribution of meat and poultry products.
California’s cultivated-chicken startup Upside Foods is suing Florida over the state’s ban on cultivated, or lab-grown, meat, alleging the ban is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, filed Aug. 12 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, alleges the ban violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause — because federal law regulating meat and poultry has priority over state law — and the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, by insulating Florida agricultural producers from out-of-state competition.
Upside Foods also alleges the ban violates two federal laws regulating the inspection and distribution of meat and poultry products.
The company is seeking a preliminary injunction to allow it to sell its lab-grown meat in Florida while the lawsuit proceeds through the courts.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May signed the ban into law, making the manufacture, distribution and sale of cultivated meat illegal in the state beginning in July.
DeSantis said the law was a way of, “fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” He promised to continue investing in local farmers and ranchers.
“If we want to invest in our future, we have to provide America with proven, safe, nutritious foods,” Florida State Senator Jay Collins, who co-sponsored the original bill, told The Defender in a statement. “Simply put, garbage in equals garbage out. If we want a healthier America, we have to have faith in what we eat.”
“Lab-grown meat is a science experiment that the American people simply cannot afford to have run on them,” Collins added.
A few weeks after Florida passed its bill, Alabama passed a similar law set to take effect in October. Iowa’s governor signed a bill prohibiting schools from buying lab-grown meat products.
Five other states have proposed similar laws. And last week, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen signed an executive order banning the state government from purchasing it.
The bans aren’t confined to the U.S. Italy in November 2023 banned the production, sale and import of the synthetic food. Outside the U.S., lab-grown meats are available only in Israel and Singapore.
Upside said in the complaint that before Florida passed its ban, the company had planned to distribute cultivated chicken at the Miami Art Basel fair in December, but now that won’t be possible.
On June 27, just before the law took effect, the company protested the ban by holding a tasting of its lab-grown chicken in Miami, Wired reported.
The lawsuit names Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson, Attorney General Ashley Moody and four state attorneys. Simpson, a key supporter of the law, called the lawsuit “ridiculous” and said “lab-grown meat is not proven to be safe enough for consumers,” The Destin Log reported.
When the law was passed, Simpson said it was key to protecting farmers and “the integrity of American agriculture.” But according to the complaint:
“Upside doesn’t want to force anyone to eat cultivated meat. But it does want the opportunity to distribute its product to willing consumers, so that those consumers can decide for themselves whether Upside’s product is worth eating.”
Attorneys from the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm dedicated to challenging government overreach that partnered with Upside to bring the case, said the ban isn’t out of safety concerns, but about economic protectionism, which they said is illegal.
“Florida’s law has nothing to do with protecting health and safety,” said plaintiff attorney Paul Sherman in a press announcement. “It is a transparent example of economic protectionism.”
Sherman said the Institute for Justice hopes to get a win in Florida and then use it as a precedent to challenge the Alabama law.
Concerns with cultivated meat
The mainstream press treats cultivated meat as a “wedge issue” because the bans largely have been implemented in Republican-controlled states. A survey by Morning Consult in July indicated that Democrats are more likely to have “positive perceptions” of lab-grown meat, particularly because of its perceived environmental benefits.
However, federal lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill to prohibit lab-grown meat in school lunch programs.
Research suggests concerns about cultivated meat span the partisan divide. The products’ unknown and potentially serious health effects, their high cost, and consumer skepticism or squeamishness have contributed to the industry’s struggle to get off the ground.
Research from the University of California, Davis, also showed lab-grown meat isn’t the environmental panacea its boosters claim. Instead, researchers found that cultured meat’s environmental impact is likely “orders of magnitude” higher than real meat, based on current production methods.
That finding is true even when accounting for production innovations that may happen in the near future, researchers said.
The industry borrowed techniques that Big Pharma uses to replicate cells to make vaccines to turn animal cells into large quantities of “cultivated meat.”
Cell-cultivated meat products are grown in large steel tanks called cultivators, or bioreactors, using cells from live animals or a cell bank, where “immortalized” cells are produced from cultured stem cells.
The cells are “fed” a mixture of sugars, amino and fatty acids, salts, and vitamins to make them proliferate quickly. Once they’ve grown into a mass or a sheet — depending on the manufacturer — they are formed into meat-looking shapes like cutlets or nuggets.
The process is energy intensive. An investigation by The New York Times revealed several incidents that occurred during the development of some of Upside’s products that raised safety concerns.
The company in 2018 found its chicken cell line contaminated with mouse cells. In 2019, they found it contaminated with rat cells.
Yet, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Upside’s meat was “safe for human consumption” in 2022, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved the sale of products by Upside Foods and Good Meat — the first two companies to go through the regulatory approval process — in June 2023.
That approval made the U.S. the second country in the world, behind Singapore, to allow sales of lab-grown meat.
Eric Schulze, Ph.D., Upside Food’s vice president of regulation and public policy, helped the company navigate the regulatory process, ensuring the lab-grown meat was not subject to extra regulatory hurdles beyond those faced by any other regular meat product — “Because our cultivated chicken is meat!” Upside states on its website.
Prior to joining Upside, Schulze worked at the FDA, regulating the biotech industry.
Others, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, raised safety concerns — including microbial contamination, biological residues and byproducts, and the presence of allergens — in a report on cell-based foods.
Last-ditch effort for a faltering industry?
Upside Foods launched a Change.org petition to protest the Florida and Alabama laws but failed to meet its 10,000-signature goal.
Between 2016 and 2022, billionaire investors like Bill Gates and Richard Branson, major meatpackers like Cargill and JBS, and even the USDA poured more than $3 billion into the industry.
Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats, has attracted more than $600 million in research and development investments. Crunchbase estimated Upside Food’s market valuation at between $1 billion and $10 billion.
However, in the last several years companies have failed to meet their goals, technological challenges have proven insurmountable and the cost of producing the cultivated meat has proven extremely high.
Venture capital funding for many tech industries, and particularly the cultivated meat industry, has dried up significantly over the past couple of years, putting added pressure on companies as they attempt to reduce the high costs of producing meat in bioreactors.
Wired reported that by 2023, the industry’s funding dropped to $226 million from $922 million just the year before, according to data from the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the development of the cultivated meat industry.
The Good Food Institute promised investors in its white papers that cultivated meats were set to replace animal meats, claiming “By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt.”
Gates is on record saying, “All rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef.”
However, with the failure of companies like Upside to realize their promises and the drop in investment, the industry is faltering.
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Crunchbase reported that despite its high valuation, Upside is “not growing.” It said:
“UPSIDE Foods has experienced several setbacks recently. The company paused a major facility project in Glenview, Illinois, and its lab-grown meat is no longer available at Bar Crenn, its sole venue. Additionally, UPSIDE Foods has cut dozens of jobs and is facing a cultivated meat ban in Florida.”
Following the Florida ban, Upside laid off 26 workers.
The company doesn’t currently have products available in stores. Partnerships with restaurants are the primary way to get their products to consumers.
In the complaint, Upside and the Institute of Justice claim that the “growing patchwork of conflicting state laws governing cultivated meat” makes it more difficult for Upside to partner with national meat distributors, “who generally will not carry products they cannot lawfully sell in every state.”
It also makes it more difficult for them to partner with restaurants. If not for the ban, they say, they would be reaching out to several restaurants to create partnerships.
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