Florida and Alabama have already outright banned the manufacture and sale of lab-grown meat products.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, signed an executive order on Thursday barring state agencies from procuring lab-grown meat—or meat products that are developed from animal cells.
Pillen announced the new guidelines alongside the Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA), saying they aim to protect the state’s agriculture industry and consumers from lab-grown meat.
“We feed the world and we save the planet more effectively and more efficiently than anybody else and I will defend those practices,” Pillen said in a
press release.
The
executive order also prohibits entities that contract with the State of Nebraska from discriminating against natural meat producers in favor of laboratory or cultivated meat producers.
In addition, Pillen instructed the NDA to initiate a rule-making process to ensure lab-grown meat products sold in stores are properly labeled and not placed next to natural meat on store shelves.
“Nebraska consumers want to know and deserve to know that what they are purchasing is safe, wholesome meat, and not a lab grown product,” NDA Director Sherry Vinton stated.
Pillen’s office stated that a public hearing on the draft regulations has been scheduled for Oct. 8. The governor also announced that he would work on drafting legislation to ban lab-grown meat in Nebraska during the upcoming legislative session.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds
signed into law in May a bill that prohibits the misbranding of certain food products, including lab-grown meat. Florida and Alabama have
outright banned the manufacture and sale of lab-grown meat products.
Lab-grown meat is created in a laboratory by taking stem cells from an animal and placing them in tanks called bioreactors full of a culture medium that enables them to multiply.
Producers extract animal cells, typically muscle cells, from living animals via biopsy, a painful procedure that requires the use of large needles. Growing those animal cells requires a growth medium.
Many companies use
fetal bovine serum (FBS) as the growth medium. FBS is extracted from the body of an unborn calf of a mother cow after it has been slaughtered, as disclosed by
SAFE, a New Zealand-based nonprofit dedicated to the prevention of animal cruelty and exploitation.
Last year, the U.S. Agriculture Department
granted its first approval to two California-based companies—Good Meat and Upside Foods—to produce and sell lab-grown chicken.
A
2023 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on safety aspects of “cell-based foods” identified several potential sources of hazards—including heavy metals, chemical contaminants, microplastics, nanoplastics, and allergens—that can cause negative health consequences.
Patricia Tolson contributed to this report.
