“This ban is a massive win for Texas ranchers, producers, and consumers,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement following the bill’s passage. “Texans have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”
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Texas joins Indiana, Mississippi, Montana and Nebraska in enacting new laws this year; Alabama and Florida did so last year. In March, the Oklahoma House approved a similar bill that did not advance out of the Senate this session.
Your entire comment assumes the state of the art for lab growing proteins is static and will not enjoy economies of scale.
I am sure it will enjoy economies of scale. Lab grown meat is currently something like 1000x the cost of animal-grown meat: I am confident they can get that down to 10x, maybe single digits. I am equally confident the inherent inefficiency of growing muscle cells without the integrated functions of the rest of the animal mean the lab cost will never be lower.
1,000×? That’s ancient history. In 2013, yeah, the first cultured burger was $330,000 (Wikipedia). Now?
SuperMeat is running full 25,000 L tanks at $11.79/lb (Green Queen, AgFunderNews) — that’s premium chicken territory, not sci-fi pricing.
Believer Meats is modeling $6.20/lb with TFF tech (Green Queen) — organic chicken prices.
Average industry cost right now is $17–23/lb (Katie Couric Media) and even a conservative academic model puts big-scale production at $28.50/lb (ScienceDirect). Still single-digit multiples, not thousands.
So no — we’re not talking “someday maybe.” We’re already at 2–4× conventional chicken for the best setups, and the price curve is still falling. Will it ever be cheaper than farm-grown? Maybe, maybe not — inefficiency is real. But “never” is a bet against tech that’s already crushed costs by over 99.99% in a decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosa_Meat
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/supermeat-cultivated-lab-grown-meat-cost-process
https://agfundernews.com/supermeat-offers-glimpse-into-a-future-where-cultivated-meat-can-be-produced-at-scale-for-11-79-lb
https://katiecouric.com/news/sustainability/what-is-lab-grown-meat-benefits-and-challenges
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666154322000916