The Alabama House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday to prohibit the manufacture, sales, and distribution of food products made from cultured animal cells, rather than live animals.
SB23 by Sen. Jack Williams, a Republican from Mobile County, passed by a vote of 85-14. The bill goes back to the Senate before it can become law because the House changed it.
There was very little discussion about the bill. Rep. Danny Crawford, R-Athens, who spoke for the bill in the House, mocked the concept of cell-cultured meat in his brief explanation of the bill.
“They throw a couple of animal cells in there. Throw some chemicals in there. Some ingredients, and boom, you get a chicken leg out,” Crawford said.
That got some laughs but no questions from House members about how the process really worked.
Rep. Marilyn Lands, D-Huntsville, urged House members to vote against the bill, calling it government overreach.
“I thought conservatives, Republicans, were all about letting the free market do its work,” Lands said. “And I don’t believe we should be dictating what people can eat, or criminalize people who sell or service certain foods even when they’ve received approval from the federal government. This makes no sense to me. We don’t even do this with cigarettes.”
The bill was amended to say that would not prevent any government agency or university from conducting research in Alabama on the production of cultivated food products.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S Food and Drug Administration for the first time approved companies to produce cell-cultivated meat products to be sold in the United States.
In July 2023, UPSIDE Foods and GOOD Meat sold the first cell-cultured chicken at restaurants in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
According to a September 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service, the first cell-cultivated meat product for human consumption was developed by a scientist from Maastricht University in the Netherlands in 2013.
In 2019, Congress directed the FDA and the USDA to establish a formal agreement on the regulation of cell-cultivated meat. The FDA is to ensure that companies producing cell-cultivated meat products follow good manufacturing practices and controls so that substances leaving the culturing process are safe. Regulations also include making sure products are properly labeled under the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act.
Worldwide, more than 150 companies are involved in the cell-cultivated meat industry, including 43 in the United States, according to the Congressional Research Service report. The United States and Singapore are the only countries that allow cell-cultivated meat products to be sold to consumers.
Challenges confronting the cell-cultivated meat industry include commercializing the technology, such as scaling up production, matching the taste and texture of traditional meat, and reducing the cost of finished products, the report said.