The People’s Republic of Florida

Comrade DeSantis’s 5-year plan does not allow for meat alternatives that aren’t damaging enough to the environment for his sensibilites:

In the Free State of Florida, Republicans have banned woke public investments, woke racial education, and woke books in school libraries. Now they’re trying to ban woke meat.

Legislation that would criminalize the sale of cultivated meat grown from animal cells is wending its way through the state House and Senate, even though cultivated meat is not currently for sale anywhere in Florida — or, for that matter, anywhere else. Governor Ron DeSantis, eager to start owning libs again after his fiasco of a presidential campaign, has said he’s on board with banning the new technology, even though the federal government has already signed off on meat grown in fermenters rather than feedlots as safe.

So what’s the beef?

The cattle industry has always had outsized clout in Florida politics — the term “cracker” originated with whip-wielding Florida cattlemen — and some Republicans hope to curry favor with the state’s ranchers by strangling potential competition in the cradle. But the crusade against cultivated meat is mostly just the latest skirmish in the DeSantis culture war against what he considers a progressive plot to make Americans feel guilty about the status quo.

In his only public comments about cultivated meat — sometimes described as “lab-grown meat,” although the ultimate goal is to grow it in breweries — DeSantis made it clear that his main objection to the nascent industry is that its leaders hope to limit animal agriculture’s damage to the climate and the environment. To the governor, growing meat outside an animal is just like taking “environment-social-governance” considerations into account in investment decisions or teaching “critical race theory” in the classroom, a left-wing assault on tradition.

“They really want to go after agriculture because they blame agriculture for global warming,” DeSantis said. “You need meat, OK? Like, we’re gonna have fake meat? That doesn’t work. There’s a whole ideological agenda that’s coming after a lot of our society.”

Setting aside the merits of the governor’s anti-woke crusade against “ESG,” “CRT,” and gay-themed books in public libraries, the cultivated meat and seafood entrepreneurs trying to harness capitalism and technology to disrupt a trillion-dollar industry notorious for government influence-peddling don’t see what’s left-wing about innovation or competition. They don’t want to be part of any culture war, and as the legislative ban has been moving through Tallahassee on party-line votes, they’re trying to remind Republicans that they’re supposed to be against the nanny state.

Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, for instance, a key supporter of the ban, actually boasts on his website that he’s “stood up to politicians who treat Floridians like children incapable of making their own choices.”

It’s very simple — making your own choices is for bringing smallpox back to your community, not which food products you want to buy or books you want to read.