Upside Foods, a cultivated meat firm, has sued Florida over its ban on lab-grown meat, arguing that the state’s legislation prohibiting the sale of cultivated meat is unconstitutional.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the ban into law in May, describing the legislation 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.”
Upside Foods and the Institute of Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm, allege that Florida’s lab-grown meat ban is about protecting the state’s cattle industry — and that the law is unconstitutional.
“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,” said Paul Sherman, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice.
“The states simply do not have the power to wall themselves off from products that have been approved by the USDA and the FDA.”
