Photo by DJ Johnson

It’s becoming increasingly clear that fascists, seemingly the world over, really hate cultivated meat. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. It offers a number of benefits to animal welfare, the environment and public health. While the technology currently exists to create the product, it’s too expensive to mass produce. This can be rectified with increased public funding for cellular-agriculture research.

I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that far-right authoritarians oppose cultivated meat, given they generally seek a return to a mythologized past. Still, I must confess to being a little startled by the speed with which opposition to cellular agriculture has become part of a shared political agenda of the international fascist movement, alongside the demonization of immigrants and transgender people. After all, cultivated meat is not even on supermarket shelves yet.

Most recently, on November 18, Hungary’s parliament voted to ban the production, distribution and marketing of cultivated meat. István Nagy, agricultural minister of the fascist Fidesz party, said, “the spread of meat produced in laboratory conditions would result in a lifestyle change that would completely upset European culture, which we cannot allow.” According to the online publication Green Queen, the European Commission, as well as European Union member states, are opposed to such bans.

Back in 2023, Italy banned the production and sale of cultivated meat. Francesco Lollobrigida, agricultural minister of the fascist Brothers of Italy party, bragged on social media at the time, “We are the first nation to ban it, with all due respect to the multinationals who hope to make monstrous profits by putting citizens’ jobs and health at risk.” Needless to say, no credible experts believe there are health risks associated with consuming cultivated meat.

Meanwhile, a number of American states controlled by the increasingly fascist Republican party have banned cultivated meat. Sid Miller, the Republican agricultural commissioner of Texas, explained the state’s ban this way: “Texans have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”

In my view, nothing has the potential of reducing more animal suffering and premature death than the widespread introduction of cheap, tasty cultivated meat. While the technology is still being developed, scientists expect the new protein will require a fraction of the greenhouse-gas emissions to produce that slaughtered meat does. Finally, since livestock are removed from the production process, our zoonotic pandemic risk would be dramatically limited.

At the barest minimum, political opponents of fascism should stand against bans on cellular agriculture. More proactively, however, they should support enormous infusions of public funding into cultivated-meat research, so the aforementioned technological hurdles preventing mass production can be overcome. As dark as things feel right now, creating a better world remains possible. Cellular agriculture will do so much for animal welfare, the environment and public health.

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