I know it's a little pointless to keep highlighting the endless lunacy of Republicans these days, but, I mean, come on. Check this out:
Gov. Ron DeSantis has endorsed legislation pending in the Legislature that would make it a criminal misdemeanor to manufacture, sell, or distribute “cultivated meat,” defined as “any meat or food product produced from cultured animal cells.”
....DeSantis, during a news conference, suggested he sees the lab-grown meat industry as another attempt to control Americans, similar to what he sees as happening with renewable energy. “You need meat, okay? We’re going to have meat in Florida. Like, we’re not going to have fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.”
This isn't about making sure that lab meat is properly labeled. Nor is DeSantis saying only that the state won't buy lab meat for school lunches. No, he wants to ban it completely in the state of Florida even though it's made by private companies and he has no apparent health or safety issues with it. He just thinks it's too woke or something.
What is wrong with these people?
Well, it does taste pretty ghastly.
But I take your point.
Edit: my bad. I was thinking of that fake meat crap. I don't know I've had food product derived from animal cells cultured in a lab, as opposed to cultured on a natural born and growing animal.
I mean, taste is taste, but I quite like the plant-based meat. Although particularly for certain things. I love plant-based meat for tacos in particular.
Impossible Burgers are quite good grilled, especially if lightly seasoned. And no risk of salmonella!
This is always such a weird gripe about plant burgers. People who eat animals will spend years perfecting their "rub" for grilling flesh. If meat were inherently delicious, there'd be no need for herbs and spices.
Likewise, plant burgers are made with minimal falvor so that people can adjust to their tastes. If you cook one, add some salt ferchrissakes!
Um nope. When it comes to grilling red meat it is pretty simple...salt and pepper and maybe, maybe, garlic powder.
Shrug. Kind of stupid.
But is it any more stupid than California's laws against foie gras and pork from pigs that are not raised to California's ethical standards even if they are produced outside of California?
At least in this case, the law is based on the product, not how it is produced.
Meat = manly. Cultured meat = not manly; woke.
Also, cultured meat was developed for what reason? Because scientists claim meat is bad for the climate. Climate = woke, science = woke
So cultured meat = woke woke woke.
It's just common sense!
Right. It couldn't be because it saves animals from suffering. Also, there's a bit of protectionism -- a nod to cattle ranching in Florida, which is huge.
Factory farming tens of thousands of chickens in one building = FREEEEEDOM!
Right-wingers shriek incessantly about freedom and cancel culture and spend most of their time figuring out how they can ban anything they don’t like.
+1 and lol!
What is wrong with these people?
In the immortal words of Cameron Poe : My first thought would be... a lot.
He only likes his meat raw and uncultivated, meat that's never been to school, hot, sweaty man-stuff meat.
No girly woke meat for Meatball Ron.
You'll find that at The Ramrod!
Another thing that should be banned is propagation by clonal grafting onto rootstocks. A hideous practice if there ever was one! Time to get Ron on the job. He can begin by banning the sale of apples in Florida.
The Seventh Day Adventist factory making imitation meat from nuts and soybeans should be closed down immediately.
I demand an exception for the tangerlime graft my father created in the early 60s on Oahu. Best damn ice tea flavoring evah!!!
The vast majority of wine grapes are grown grafted on to root stock. Time to ban it and stick it to all those brie eating Chardonnay sipping liberals.
I'm somewhat surprised to learn that there are wineries in Florida. You'd think that grapes wouldn't grow in sodden swampsoil, but guess like with everything else about Florida, if you dump enough dumb money into it, it can be made to work.
I'm sure there are grapevines that do perfectly fine in FL. I seriously doubt any wine made from it is going to be terribly good, however, unless you're into really treacly, sweet stuff. A lot of people are, though, and so super-chilled, super sweet blush wines you can guzzle easily on humid summer evenings probably sell well.
He reminds me of my brother whom I once saw tip over a monopoly board because his children had made up some rules of their own to make the game fairer. And a mature age student who stormed out of class when I set some supplementary assessment tasks when I realised the first one had been too difficult, because "That's not how it works". I'm sure there's a name for a personality type who takes any departure from "the rules" as a personal affront.
Unprincipled:
A personality type who takes any departure from "the rules" as a personal affront, which necessarily requires a complete disregard for the most basic "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" human principle.
And I was just reading that you cannot buy cultured meat anywhere anymore. Nothing to do with DeSantis.
I think it costs more to produce than it can be sold for. That will probably change.
Growing mammalian cells usually requires bovine serum albumin or fetal bovine serum--which is expensive and not animal product free. There are some animal product free substitutes, including recombinant albumin now, but they're still expensive and some are not as effective.
Unless you lived in San Francisco or Singapore and managed to get a dinner reservation at one of two specific restaurants at very specific times last year, you couldn't buy it to begin with.
The companies working on this have figured out how to make cultivated meat, but they have not yet figured out how to make it at scale for a reasonable price. (They were undoubtedly taking an enormous loss on their sales to those restaurants; but they got a lot of buzz and probably some useful data.)
DeSantis is trying to squelch or at least damage the cultivated meat industry before it can get started, either as a culture-war maneuver or because he's getting lobbying money from the regular meat industry, or more likely both.
What's wrong with these people? They're drowning...
He hates modern culture so much, he heard that this was cultured meat and he went cuckoo.
This. The whole "lab-grown meat" thing is too "sciency", like mRNA vaccines and sex changing medical therapies. If they didn't do it in 1800, dammit, we can't do it now!!
DeSantis is just echoing the concerns of all good conservative patriots. He is just the latest in a long line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4XhhTF7vRM
Perhaps DeSantis identifies too closely with cultured meat and is simply trying to protect his own...
It is a bit difficult to believe that someone as unpleasant yet oddly near-human as DeSantis was raised in an organic family and not cultured in a lab experiment gone awry.
😄😄😄
I have to wonder how much of this is driven by culture war politicking and how much is lobbying from the meat industry. They've been going after plant-based meat products hard over the last few years, and I'm sure they intend to be just as aggressive with cultivated meat.
The cultivated meat industry is just getting started; it doesn't have a customer base yet and therefore not much of a constituency among voters. So accepting lobbyist dollars to squelch it is easy money for DeSantis and the Florida legislature. I'm guessing the culture-war side is just a bonus.
A lot of the local burger joints and restaurants up here in Whatcom county have vegan meat options AND gluten free buns and bread. The first products could be a bit nasty, but they have improved a LOT just over the last 4+ years. Freezer cases in our local Haggen, Safeway, and Coop have a lot of options.
My first thought too was the meat lobby. But on second thought, I doubt that's what's driving it.
This story echoes the 1990s lawsuit by Texas against Oprah Winfrey, who aired a show about food safety and the possible dangers of mad cow disease. Texas did have a libel law against disparagement of meat and beef prices had taken a dip. Still, Oprah prevailed.
But Florida is not Texas. For one thing, the meat industry is much smaller: more than 13 million cattle in Texas, under 1 million in Florida. Hard to see how meat is a vital economic interest to Florida.
DeSantis is not a politician guided (solely) by the money interests in his state. If he were, he would never have gone so hard after Disney, a company that single-handedly does more economic good for his state than about any company does for any other state. It was a trivial issue that would have been forgotten in a day but DeSantis went on a crusade that still boggles the mind.
I think that's a difference between DeSantis (and others now in the GOP) and the Republican Party of old. Culture drives his politics more than economic interests, and in the lurch toward authoritarianism, defending your preferences is not enough. You must punish and outlaw dissenting views and practices.
I think you are right. But I'll also admit that I had assumed that a lot of DeSantis's nonsense was geared towards him running for the Republican nomination, and now that that's over and done with, he'd calm down on the weird shit.
Guess I was wrong.
Now that he's been thoroughly wupped nationally I think gov. ron is going to go on a banning rampage just to show his ever potent unculturedness.
Ron DeSantis - the truly artificial white meat. /s
The Founding Fathers had slaves, no medical abortions if one of them (the slaves, I mean) fell pregnant, no Spanish speaking neighbors, no amusement parks within sight and only meat that came from things that walked. Anyone who deviates from that hates the Constitution.
SUVs, semiautomatic rifles and television are fine, though.
Using the plunging price of renewable energy to control Americans. Ha!
They're anger junkies. They WANT to be angry about something. Worse, at this point, a lot of them NEED to be angry about something. Cultured meat is something to be angry about. If he told them to be angry about dust bunnies, or the shade of yellow on road striping, or the little bar-code labels that supermarkets stick on fruit, they'd get angry about those.
This was Murdoch's true marketing genius: prey on the crankiness of bored, mostly uneducated, mostly old people. Turn it into full-time anger and resentment. But whether he saw that it would become a consuming addiction I have no idea.
democrats really don't understand how this game is played
if dems did this fox would start screaming that they're criminalizing meat and they'd push it until every media organization picked up their framing
Point taken, but I dunno if it would get the same kind of traction. It's inherently kinda dumb. It's really just an appeal to emotion -- specifically anger -- and to be successful it would need an audience primed to react with anger about, well, dumb things. Dems can get angry -- I think Dems are getting angry -- but more about serious things, like women's rights, LGBTQ rights, poverty and homelessness, looming environmental catastrophe, etc. I think a campaign about Florida being "anti-meat" would be met mostly with a shrug.
agreed; mainly making the point that even ridiculous stuff from the right will get traction and the 'new shiny thing' will dominate a few news cycles
so dominating every news cycle with ridiculous stuff (like trump's insults) keeps the focus off of more important issues
DeSantis failed out for the 2024 race, even though he upped the crazy in an effort to out-wackadoo the Defendant. So now he's back in the game, trying for Veep! Or maybe 2028. Who knows? The cruelty is the point! Also, the stupidity!
The appalling thing is that this is what Floridians seem to want.
So in Florida, you can purchase gun without a permit and carry a concealed wepon around, but you may not be able to get an FDA approved food product because DeathSantis doesn't like the idea?
What ever happened to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?
In Florida, you can manufacture, sell, or distribute vape juice. Some disruptive innovations are more Floridian, I guess.
Wait -- what if we call it "Western cultured meat"?!
There is quite a lot of criminal law that's based on the "ick" factor; many people think that because they find something repellent, it should be banned. When you bring up the subject of cultured meat, you will get a lot of "ick" responses, particularly from people who are generally suspicious of innovation (such people used to be called "conservative").
There may be nothing more to it than that; DeSantis is a conservative sort, and he views cultured meat as "ick".
(from the Elvish yrch, "Orcs.")
In quoting Governor Ronald's words, you neglected to quote his thoughts. Allow me:
DeSantis, during a news conference, implied he thinks that banning the lab-grown meat industry is another attempt to control Americans worthy of the effort.
DeSantis clearly has learned nothing from his failed attempt to play EggHead version of Trump.
Strange demarche anyway as the investment returns from the alt-foods start-ups / initiatives have been quite poor - consumers are rather giving this a miss all of their own.
Bizarre effort, hard to see what the point is.
It is bizarre. Lab-grown meat is years away from being even remotely commercially viable. Interestingly, the companies at the forefront of developing this technology are almost all Israeli. So DeSantis is really just cancelling Israel, which I think is also illegal in Florida. Oh noes!
This is just a blatant sop to the Florida beef industry. They're also up in arms about Impossible Burger calling itself "burger", but I don't think they had any legal recourse over that.
If DeSantis and other Republican governors really wanted to help the beef industry, they'd be working on solutions to the climate crisis. Herd numbers are at an all time low this year after ranchers throughout the midwest had to sell off their cattle due to the massive drought across the southern plains. The price of feed simply got too high and all the pasture was gone and the wells were running dry. Now if you're a rancher who's been able to maintain a good herd somewhere like MT or SD, prices are through the roof right now and you're sitting pretty, at least this year. But if prices stay too high for too long, consumers will eventually start eating less beef and switch to alternatives like pork or chicken and then you've played yourself. These droughts (along with brutal heatwaves) are going to become harsher and more frequent in future years. It won't be much longer before bovines simply can't survive Texas (or FL) summers anymore.
I'm fully aware that livestock ranching is, itself, a contributor to climate change. But with regenerative grazing techniques and promoting grass-fed, as opposed to feedlot-fattened, cattle, farmers can mitigate a lot of it.
"If DeSantis and other Republican governors really wanted to help the beef industry, they'd be working on solutions to the climate crisis"
I'd think that any governor of a state composed of tidal estuaries, sand bars, and swamps, with an average elevation of just 100 feet above sea level, would be working on solutions to the climate crisis out of a sense of self-preservation. I mean, ffs, Miami floods during slightly-higher-than-normal high tides.
Denial's not just a river in Egypt...
Conservative angst,
https://i.redd.it/y2l6ljyd3kgc1.jpeg
The world is always on the other side.
Ron who?
DeSantis doesn't like it because it eliminates harm to the cow.
Conservatives think everything has a price, every good has an offsetting evil and vice versa, and killing the cow provides the good of meat.
Without the killing it becomes valueless to them.