Billionaire Bill Gates is suing Florida after Governor Ron DeSantis issued a complete ban on his lab-grown meat, arguing that the new law violates his constitutional rights.
DeSantis signed the ban on fake meat into law in May.
The Florida Governor described the new law as a way of “fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.”
Gates-funded Upside Foods and the non-profit Institute of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday. They claim the ban is unconstitutional and is intended to protect the state’s cattle industry.
According to the complaint, SB 1084 violates the Constitution’s Supremacy and Commerce clauses and two federal laws regulating the inspection and distribution of meat and poultry products.
“Our Constitution gives Congress the power to create and enforce a national common market so people can make decisions for themselves about what products they want to buy in the interstate market,” Paul Sherman, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, said during a Tuesday press conference.
“The states simply do not have the power to wall themselves off from products that have been approved by the USDA and the FDA.”
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Meanwhile, other companies offering alternatives to animal-based products have found themselves targeted at the state level, with laws prohibiting them from selling the products.
Upside and the Institute for Justice argue the ban is intended to protect the state’s cattle industry from out-of-state competition., and therefore, violates the “dormant aspect” of the Commerce Clause, which prohibits state protectionism,
The complaint notes that cattle ranchers flanked Ron DeSantis and “spoke in front of a podium that featured a sign stating, ‘SAVE OUR BEEF.'”
Florida’s Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”
“Lab-grown ‘meat’ is not proven to be safe enough for consumers and it is being pushed by a liberal agenda to shut down farms. Food security is a matter of national security, and our farmers are the first line of defense,” Simpson said in a statement.
“States are the laboratory of democracy, and Florida has the right to not be a corporate guinea pig. Leave the Frankenmeat experiment to California.”
However, Upside’s complaint alleges that Florida’s ban on lab-grown meat is not about food safety but protectionism.
Upside also argues that the ban harms operations elsewhere in the country.
Similar bans on fake meat have been implemented in other states, including Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.
Upside and the Institute of Justice argue that the “growing patchwork of conflicting state laws governing cultivated meat” makes it more difficult for Upside to partner with national meat distributors, “who generally will not carry products they cannot lawfully sell in every state.”
The complaint, filed in the Northern District of Florida, also notes that Upside had begun a partnership with a Miami-based chef before Florida’s ban on lab-grown meat went into effect on July 1st
Upside is now asking the court to declare Florida’s cultivated meat ban unconstitutional.
“If consumers don’t like the idea of cultivated meat, there’s a simple solution,” Sherman said.
“They don’t have to eat it. But they can’t make that decision for other consumers.”
