With cultivated meat ban, Florida drags the right into the left’s anti-science idiocy | Opinion
So Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a law that will protect me from one of my greatest fears: that the ribeye I am eating is Frankenfood grown in a lab somewhere. Last week, he signed the nation’s first statewide ban on selling or distributing cultivated or lab-grown meat. And Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall has signed onto a bill that will at least let me know that fake plant meat is fake, er, “imitation” beef. Phew.
It is almost as if the laws are designed to signal virtuous deference to ranchers and a desire to keep things the way they’ve always been. I thought the Trumpy right looked down on virtue signaling, but not when it is for the “virtues” they like, I guess.
In America, food politics has become identity politics. As a result, it is only going to get more toxic. Liberals are going to micromanage your choice of drinking utensil while conservatives protect you from being confused by advertisements for Impossible Meat that make you think it comes from a steer. Pantry police progressivism is now competing with the conservative catering cops.
Like most bad things in America, it is liberals’ fault. It all started when the values of college town granola co-ops metastasized to every grocery store, 7-Eleven and bodega in America. Every time a suburban mom buys a gluten-free, non-GMO, soy milk latte in a recycled, sustainable cup made with fair trade organic coffee at Starbucks without thinking about it, she bows before the power of liberals to impose their morality on us all.
Of course, Republicans were going to rebel. And their rebellion will be every bit as stupid and intrusive as liberals’ provocation.
They’ll make sure every fast-food burger joint traffics in dead cow meat paste instead of humane lab-grown meat paste. The food will be the same schlock, but at least slaughterhouses will still be in business. Big government will shred the First Amendment to make sure that calling soy juice by the harmless misnomer “soy milk” will confuse no low-IQ red state denizens into hurting the dairy industry. Thank goodness.
And while I make fun of the silliness of it all, the Hamas wing of intolerant evangelical veganism is not without real victims.
The most important one is (obviously) me. Have you ever tried to get toddlers fed and relatively quiet in a restaurant where they insist on giving your kids cardboard straws that keep turning into mush? It is not fun. And every second it took to get through the first night it happened, I silently fumed at The Squad and swore to someday make that gaggle of commie congresswomen pay. Their day will come.
Out in the rest of the world, raw, whole, grain-free, whey, vegan cauliflower pizza crust comes with a dangerous — and deadly — hitchhiker under the vague moniker “non-GMO verified.”
G, M and O are not the letters that come after LGBTQIA+. Rather, they stand for genetically modified organism. Scientists have found ways to take the genetics from, say, a manta ray and put it in pineapple to make it resistant to some Hawaiian fungus or other. It’s a cool trick that can make pineapple for your fruit salad cheaper and more plentiful. Yay, science!
But in some places, genetically modified food is a matter of life and death. In Africa, getting grains to grow with less water, less fertilizer and fewer pesticides can be the difference between famine and feast. Millions of lives are on the line. And the sick purveyors of fear over science, such as Greenpeace, have convinced African countries to ban the very technology that could save them.
Elsewhere, GMOs make food more nutritious. For instance, adding vitamin A to rice can prevent hundreds of thousands of cases of blindness among people in developing countries where people have limited variety in their diets.
A group of more than 100 Nobel Laureates got together a few years ago to condemn Greenpeace for its anti-scientific stand, accusing them of “crimes against humanity” and arguing the group has the blood of millions of people on its hands.
For some stupid reason, Gov. DeSantis has decided to bring Florida into the anti-science fold. He should be ashamed. Kansas and Missouri shouldn’t follow.
David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com
