Mississippi’s house representatives have just adopted a bill prohibiting meat cultivated. This makes Mississippi the third state to prohibit meat cultivated in tanks from small samples of animal cells.
THE Mississippi Bill Will make illegal for anyone to make, sell or distribute meat cultivated in the state. Steking the law would be an offense, liable to a fine of more than $ 500 and / or up to three months in prison from the county. Similar laws were adopted last year Florida And Alabama Also transport potential prison conditions or fines of up to $ 500.
The bill is now awaiting the signing of the Governor Tate Reeves and will become the law unless he chooses the bill to the bill. Mississippi’s commissioner for agriculture, Andy Gipson, criticized the cultivated meat industry, and he supported a 2019 bill which prevented cultivated meat products labeled as meat in the state. In 2024, he published an article on his website which congratulated the prohibitions of cultivated meat in Florida and Alabama. “I want my steak to come from high beef, not a teeth of a laboratory,” he wrote.
“This has a very, very, very strong sense of political theater,” explains Suzi Gerber, executive director of the association for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation, a commercial group representing the cultivated meat industry. The real impact of the law in one of these states would be minimal, she says, because cultivated meat has not been available for sale in any of them.
Republican representatives Bill Pigott and Lester Carpenter presented the Mississippi bill in January 2025. She adopted the two houses without a single vote in opposition. But similar legislation in other states has had less smooth path. A Wyoming Bill Who would have prohibited cultivated meat was elected during his third reading in the Senate in February, while a similar bill proposed in southern Dakota did not succeed in crossing a Senate vote in February.
“I was surprised but encouraged by the results in these states,” explains Gerber. In Wyoming, some senators have argued for better packaging and labeling provisions instead of a pure and simple ban on cultivated meat, while in southern dakota Some legislators opposed The ban, arguing that it would inhibit free trade.
Other states are considering legislation similar to that already adopted in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. A bill presented in Georgia in January would make illegal to sell cultivated meat. In Nebraska, a bill that Prohibit cultivated meat In the state was presented at the request of Governor Jim Pillen in January.
The prohibition of Florida is currently challenged in a legal case deposited by the Californian cultivated meat firm Upside Foods and the Institute of Justice, a law firm of public interest for non -profit. The case argues that the prohibition of Florida violates two distinct parts of the American Constitution, which cover interstate trade and the relationship between federal law and state law. In October, a federal judge denied Request for the increase in food for a preliminary injunction This would have interrupted the ban on cultivated meat from Florida.
The constant dripping of state bans coincided with a slowdown in investors’ enthusiasm for cultivated meat. Only $ 226 million were Invested in cultivated meat startups In 2023, considerably down compared to $ 922 million in 2022. At the start of 2024, rising foods workers’ licenseeWhile the California scififoods have closed In total, later that year.
But there are signs that the industry is going back to these opposite winds. On March 8, barns mission of the cultivated meat company based in San Francisco announced that the Food and Drug Administration no longer had questions on the safety of its cultivated pork fat, a major step towards the sale of the product in the United States. Only two other companies, Upsy Foods and Eat Just Just, received a similar letter from the FDA. Now Mission Barns only needs the approval of the American Department of Agriculture to launch out in the United States.
