Meat, freedom and Gov. Ron DeSantis
It’s possible to grow meat in a lab — to cultivate animal cells without an animal and turn them into something people can eat. However, that process is difficult and expensive. And at the moment, lab-grown meat isn’t commercially available and probably won’t be for a long time, if ever.
Still, if and when lab-grown meat, also sometimes referred to as cultured meat, makes it onto the market at less than outrageous prices, a significant number of people will probably buy it. Some will do so on ethical grounds, preferring not to have animals killed to grace their dinner plates. Others will do so in the belief that growing meat in labs does less damage to the environment than devoting acres and acres to animal grazing. And it’s at least possible that lab-grown meat will eventually be cheaper than meat from animals.
And if some people choose to consume lab-grown meat, why not? It’s a free country, right?
Not if the likes of Ron DeSantis have their way. Recently DeSantis signed a bill banning the production or sale of lab-grown meat in Florida. Similar legislation is under consideration in several states.
On one level, this could be seen as a trivial story — a crackdown on an industry that doesn’t even exist yet. But the new Florida law is a perfect illustration of how crony capitalism, culture war, conspiracy theorizing and rejection of science have been merged — ground together, you might say — in a way that largely defines American conservatism today.
First, it puts the lie to any claim that the right is the side standing firm for limited government; government doesn’t get much more intrusive than having politicians tell you what you can and can’t eat.
Who’s behind the ban? Remember when a group of Texas ranchers sued Oprah Winfrey over a show warning about the risks of mad cow disease that they said cost them millions? It’s hard to imagine that today, meat industry fears about losing market share to lab meat aren’t playing a role. And such concerns about market share aren’t necessarily silly. Look at the rise of plant-based milk, which in 2020 accounted for 15% of the milk market.
But politicians who claim to worship free markets should be vehemently opposed to any attempt to suppress innovation when it might hurt established interests, which is what this amounts to. Why aren’t they?
Part of the answer, of course, is that many never truly believed in freedom — only freedom for some. Beyond that, however, meat consumption, like almost everything else, has been caught up in the culture wars. Eating or claiming to eat lots of meat has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd.
But even if you’re someone who insists “real” Americans eat lots of meat, why must the meat be supplied by killing animals if an alternative becomes available? Opponents of lab-grown meat like to talk about the industrial look of cultured meat production, but what do they imagine many modern meat processing facilities look like?
And then there are the conspiracy theories. It’s a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It’s also a fact that under President Joe Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden’s eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans’ burger consumption.
And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects?
By the way, I’m not a vegetarian and have no intention of eating bugs. But I respect other people’s choices — which right-wing politicians increasingly don’t.
And aside from demonstrating that many right-wingers are actually enemies, not defenders, of freedom, the lab-meat story is yet another indicator of the decline of American conservatism as a principled movement.
Look, I’m not an admirer of Ronald Reagan, who I believe did a lot of harm as president, but at least Reaganism was about real policy issues like tax rates and regulation. The people who cast themselves as Reagan’s successors, however, seem uninterested in serious policymaking. For a lot of them, politics is a form of live-action role play.
But while they may not care about reality, reality cares about them. Their deep unseriousness can do — and is already doing — a great deal of damage to America and the world.
Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.
Dear anti-Israel campus protesters: Although it may take a few years before you realize it, supporters of Israel like me have reasons to give thanks to militant anti-Zionists like you.
Recently, a friend asked what I would have made of your protests if they had been less fervently one-sided. If, for instance, pro-Palestinian student groups at Harvard and Columbia hadn’t castigated Israel immediately following the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Or if Jewish students and professors hadn’t faced violence, harassment and antisemitic imagery from you or your allies from Harvard to Columbia to Berkeley to Stanford. Or if you had made a point of acknowledging the reality of the Oct. 7 rapes or the suffering of Israel’s hostages and their families while demanding their safe return. Or if you consistently condemned and distanced yourselves from Hamas. Or if all of you had simply followed rules that gave you every right to free expression without trampling on the rights of others to a safe and open campus.
In short, what if your protests had focused on Israel’s policies, whether in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, rather than demanding the complete elimination of Israel as a Jewish state? What if you had avoided demonizing anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist — which includes a vast majority of Jews — as modern-day Nazis?
In that case, I told my friend, I would have disagreed with your views but I wouldn’t have despised them. Nor would a broad plurality of Americans, including many to my left. The result could have been a movement that would have had stronger arguments and greater impact. You would have been able to win over undecideds to your cause. And I would have had to fight harder to make my case that Israel must get rid of Hamas.
I realize this isn’t how some of you see it. The most hard-line among you want to “sharpen the contradictions,” as the Marxists say. Your real goal was not to shape U.S. government policy, at least in the near term. What you really want to do is normalize anti-Zionism, particularly on elite college campuses, while hoping that the bigger payoff will come in 20 or 30 years, when those you’ve converted to your cause become senators and governors and university