Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning the sale of lab-grown meat to protect the state’s agriculture industry.
He characterized lab-grown meat as part of an “ideological agenda” pushed by elites at forums like the World Economic Forum to blame ranchers for climate change.
DeSantis said the WEF vision of restricting everyday freedoms while elites act freely is “dead on arrival” in Florida.
Global elites want to control our behavior and push a diet of petri dish meat and bugs on Americans.
Florida is saying no. I was proud to sign SB 1084 to keep lab grown meat out of Florida and prioritize our farmers and ranchers over the agenda of elites and the World Economic… pic.twitter.com/vHdWaJtckU
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) May 1, 2024
“These will be people who will lecture the rest of us about things like global warming, they will say that you can’t drive a internal combustion engine vehicle, they’ll say that agriculture is bad, meanwhile, they’re flying to Davos and their private jets,” DeSantis said. “This is really a vision of imposing restrictions on freedoms for everyday people while these elites are effectively pulling the strings, calling the shots, and doing whatever the hell they want to do in their own lives.”
He argued they want to eliminate livestock farming and transition to lab-grown protein.
While they claim to support the free market, DeSantis said their real goal is replacing natural meat with lab alternatives to phase out cattle ranching.
“We have fought it through standing up against things like Central Bank Digital Currency, where they want to be able to control your money; we fought against it by banning the Chinese Communist Party from purchasing land in the state of Florida; we have fought it by putting an end to woke banks denying or canceling financial services for Florida, just based on their political opinions; and we’ve also protected Floridians from government tracking of credit card transactions related to the purchase of firearms and ammunition,” he added.
“I think what they’re looking to do is create a social credit system. That’s what they have in China. And so your ability to participate in the economy, access credit, will be circumscribed by your ideological positions and your political positions.”
He presented the bill as protecting Florida’s industries by preemptively heading off threats from groups seeking to reshape food systems.
The governor framed the issue as part of broader efforts to curb the influence of organizations promoting agendas at odds with Florida’s values and economic interests.
“They want to basically eliminate meat, they want to eliminate cattle, they want to eliminate chickens, and they want to create protein in laboratories,” DeSantis said. “So it’s fake, essentially, lab-created meat, and their goal is to get to a point where you will not be raising cattle, where you will not be developing meat like we’ve been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years in the State of Florida.”
“That’s not really what they’re going for because they know if that was put out there to compete with with normal beef that they would lose,” he said.
“So what they want to do is put that out there and then say, ‘Well, wait a minute, you can do this in a lab. You don’t need to do cattle, you don’t need to do all this, so why don’t you just phase all that out? That’s ultimately the goal. Now they’re not at the point where they’re going to execute that today. But I think part of being good stewards of these industries, of the state, of the public well being, is to think of forward and head off threats before they even come.”
