At a press conference in February, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, told a room full of reporters: “We’re not going to do that fake meat. That doesn’t work.” He’d been discussing legislation under debate in the statehouse that would ban cell-cultivated meat – an emerging technique that, instead of slaughtering animals for consumption, grows meat in a lab using a small sample of animal cells.

A few weeks later, a Republican member of the Florida legislature – and cattle rancher – Dean Black took to the House floor, saying, “Cultured meat is not meat … it is made by man, real meat is made by God Himself … If you really want to try the nitrogen-based protein paste, go to California.”

In March, Florida passed the legislation both men had been addressing: making it the first state in the nation poised to ban “lab-grown” meat. (DeSantis still needs to sign the bill.)

Florida isn’t the only state on track to ban cell-cultivated meat. Three other states – Alabama, Arizona and Tennessee – are currently debating legislation that would ban the production or sale of cell-cultivated meat, despite the fact that cell-cultivated meat isn’t actually on sale anywhere in the country. Sixteen states plus the federal government have already instituted regulations on labeling cell-cultivated meat, such as prohibiting companies from using the word “meat” in their marketing, or requiring them to print a disclosure explaining that the product contains cell-cultured products.

But experts say these new laws sweeping red states aren’t so much about the many safety, ethical and environmental questions lab-grown meat pose – they’re about the culture wars.

“These are political efforts to rile up voters,” says Sparsha Saha, a lecturer on meat politics at Harvard, who notes that cell-cultivated meat is a long way away from being produced on scale to reach most consumers. “Meat is inherently political. We know that meat attachment is higher on the right. We know that masculinity norms tend to be stronger among conservative men – and meat is associated with masculinity … If you’re a politician and you want to make sure that conservative men are getting mobilized to come out and vote, this is a really good political strategy.”

At the same time, the focus on cell-cultivated meat serves as a distraction from other, more important food issues, Saha says, like “the fact that a lot of people can’t afford their groceries any longer”.

Lab-grown meat is still a new technology. In 2013, a Dutch scientist created the first cell-cultivated meat product for human consumption. Growing cell-cultivated meat requires taking a sample from an actual animal, and then feeding that sample nutrients like amino acids, vitamins, sugar and salts while it grows in a bioreactor. This, supporters say, eliminates many of the environmental problems – deforestation, water contamination, greenhouse gas emissions – posed by animal agriculture.

Although more than 150 companies are now working in the cell-cultivated meat industry worldwide, it’s not yet widely available to the public: Only two restaurants in the US have sold cultivated meat. In 2023, restaurants in San Francisco and Washington DC sold cell-cultivated chickens developed by Upside Foods and Good Meat – but those products are no longer available at either restaurant.

As the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) debated federal regulations for this new technology, states across the US began requiring special labels for cell-cultivated meat. In 2018, Missouri became the first state to pass such a law. The following year, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming followed suit. Kansas, Louisiana, Georgia and Texas have since joined them.

Chloe Marie, a research specialist at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Agricultural and Shale Law, said it was “pretty unclear” who would have the authority to regulate cell-cultured food: “We were very much in uncharted territory. And so because of that, many stakeholders started pushing for some regulatory actions.”

A new Republican-sponsored bill introduced to Congress earlier this year, the Fair and Accurate Ingredient Representation on Labels Act of 2024, would authorize the USDA to regulate “cell-cultured” and “imitation” meat product labels. Democratic senator Jon Tester and Republican senator Mike Rounds also introduced a bill to ban cell-cultivated meat in school lunch and breakfast programs, even though it’s not currently available in any school lunches – or anywhere else in the US – with backing from the US Cattlemen’s Association. (Although conservatives have strongly favored labeling efforts for cell-cultivated meat, they’ve called out labeling of other products, like sugary drinks and junk food, as government overreach.)

The state bans introduced this year go a step further and prohibit the development and sale of cell-cultivated meat. Anyone found in violation of the ban in Florida or Alabama could be charged with a misdemeanor, while those who violate the ban in Tennessee could be fined up to $1m.

“We want to protect our cattle and our ranches,” said Arizona representative Michael Carbone.

The US Cattlemen’s Association, the main lobbying group for American beef producers, is also pushing back against lab-grown meat, saying in 2022 that “cell-cultured products cannot be independently produced – the technology is shrouded in intellectual property protection and requires intensive capital resources” which “could lead to the monopolistic control of America’s sovereign food supply”.

While defenders of these bills say they’re concerned about the safety of new techniques, experts say there’s also a politicized fear of science at play. “Historically, science has been a friend to agriculture. And instead of us being accurate about that relationship in the past, I think what we’re seeing on the right is this undermining of science that perhaps started with Covid, if not earlier with vaccines,” said Saha.

Amid these bans, California is investing in cell-cultivated meat. As animal agriculture is increasingly recognized as a key contributor to the climate crisis, lab-grown meat has been pointed to as a potential solution. Though many environmental experts worry it’s a solution that will come too late – and that allowed us to forgo the difficult work of rethinking our relationship with meat and agriculture. In 2022, California became the first state in the nation to publicly fund cell-cultivated meat research. And the year before, the USDA gave Tufts University in Massachusetts $10m to support a cellular agriculture institute. However, the vast majority of funding for cell-cultivated meat has come from venture capital.

The North American Meat Institute, the country’s largest trade association for meat packers and producers, and dozens of biotech investors have spoken out against bans like the one Florida is set to pass – arguing that it will stifle innovation and limit consumer choice.

“We think consumers should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to try cultivated seafood. The USDA and FDA should continue to regulate food products in this country, not state legislators who lack the required expertise in food safety,” said Justin Kolbeck, co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, a cultivated seafood company, who says he and his colleagues have traveled to Arizona, Alabama and Florida to discuss pending bans. “Rather than bowing to special interest groups who are trying to stifle innovation, we’ve encouraged state legislators to work with our industry on clear labeling.”

Even if Desantis signs his state’s cultivated meat ban into law in coming weeks, Marie suspects the issue won’t be laid to rest. “A lot of environmental or food conscious associations have challenged many of these labeling laws,” she said. In states like Arkansas and Mississippi, companies sued to challenge laws that would have prevented them using terms like “meatless meatballs” and “plant-based jumbo hotdogs”. Marie says she “would not be surprised if they also challenge these banning laws”.

A rocky path, strewn with thick tree roots, leads from a dirt road down to a small green hut overlooking the choppy waters of the Beagle Channel, a strait between Chile and Argentina. The shack is home to Diane Mendez and her family but doubles as Alama Yagan, one of nine restaurants in the fishing village of Puerto Almanza.

The village, in Argentinian Tierra del Fuego, has become a foodie haven, and the final stop on the king crab route, a trail that starts in the provincial capital Ushuaia, 45 miles to the east. But things could have been different.

In 2021, the provincial government voted to ban intensive salmon farming in Argentinian waters, after campaigners successfully argued that it would wreak environmental havoc, close down local fishing fleets and threaten the established nature-tourism sector, which employs 16,500 people.

“Everything in the sea has benefited from the ban on industrial salmon farming,” says Mendez. “The whole ecosystem was saved, from the crabs to the seaweed; they all depend on a healthy Beagle Channel.”

For chefs such as Mendez, the sea is her larder. It provides the centolla, or king crab, for which the region is famous, as well as mussels, which her husband freedives to collect each day, and huge kelp forests, which she harvests to use in her cooking. And it’s all shared with colonies of sea lions, rock shags, and the occasional southern right whale passing through.

The success in Tierra del Fuego led to the formation of the Global Salmon Farming Resistance (GSFR), an alliance of environmental organisations and scientists that is pushing for others to follow Argentina’s lead. The Falkland Islands has also banned the farms, while the Canadian province of British Columbia has promised to “transition away” from salmon farming by 2025. The US state of Washington has also banned them.

But in neighbouring Chile, the same level of protection does not exist. “Things drastically changed over the years with the arrival of this industry,” says Daniel Casado, a film-maker and activist for Centinela Patagonia, a group of biologists, engineers, artists and fishers who monitor the marine ecosystem around the salmon farms.

The first open-net salmon farms arrived in Chilean waters in the 1980s, where the sheltered coastline and cold currents offered perfect conditions. They went unnoticed initially, but now there are an estimated 1,400 dotted among the islands and inlets of the Chiloé archipelago.

“They pretty much destroyed the Chiloé area,” says Casado. Now, the industry is moving south, threatening some of Chile’s last stretches of pristine coastline. This includes Magallanes, a region he describes as the last frontier before Antarctica, and home to the Kawésqar national park.

The park has become the new frontline in the battle against salmon farming due to a quirk in the law that means only its land, not its waters, are protected. Yet ironically, the Kawésqar, an Indigenous people who live in the area, are a nomadic “canoe people”, who live on the water, not the land.

As a result of the way the law works, the fjords and channels are becoming a new hub for the salmon industry and Casado fears the continued growth of the farms will devastate local ecosystems and fishing communities.

Artisanal fishing has all but disappeared in Chiloé, he says, with local laws preventing people accessing traditional fishing grounds close to the farms. Salmon are also alien to Chilean waters, and the millions that escape each year outcompete indigenous species. There are simply no fish left to catch, says Casado.

By exceeding stocking limits and placing nets too close together, the farms are also affecting water quality, he claims. “Dead zones” are appearing directly beneath the pens – patches of seabed that are devoid of life due to the buildup of fish faeces and other detritus. “In many areas there is a complete lack of oxygen – nothing can live,” he says.

The charge sheet continues, with activists also placing the blame for huge algal blooms, or “red tides”, on the farms. The algae flourishes in the artificially nutrient-rich waters around the pens, and often proves toxic to fish, including salmon, and other marine species.

“The industry says this is natural and not down to them,” says Casado. “But in reality, the eutrophication of the area, by putting so much stuff in the water, causes a big change in the environment.”

The Chilean government has also begun striking deals with fish farms that have been set up in national parks illegally by relocating them to new sites, he says.

“The government needs to start taking this issue seriously; otherwise businesses will continue to destroy an area, move on and do it all over again, until there will be no other place to go,” Casado says.

The industry disputes the effects it has on the environment. Catarina Martins is chief sustainability and technology officer at the Norwegian multinational Mowi, which is one of the world’s largest salmon-farming businesses and has a huge presence in Chile.

She believes the likes of the GSFR paint an out-of-date picture of a well-regulated industry that operates within strict frameworks. “We are not the cause of these dead zones,” she says.

It is simply easier to blame the industry for events such as the algal blooms, she argues, rather than considering more complicated causes, such as the effects of the climate emergency on ocean dynamics and water temperature.

The industry is looking at ways to reduce its footprint, says Martins. For instance, introducing fallow periods of between four to six weeks, when no fish are farmed, helps to avoid any “cumulative impact” on the seabed, giving the environment time to recover. Skirts around the top of the pens are being installed to prevent infestations of sea lice, a parasite that can thrive in fish farms and decimate the salmon. This has also cut the need for medicated feeds containing antibiotics, which can leach into the environment.

Underwater lights encourage salmon to feed at different levels, moving them around the pens and preventing disease from spreading so easily. Critics, however, suggest that not enough research has been carried out into their effects on other fish and marine mammals.

Outside Alama Yagan, an Argentinian flag flutters in the strong breeze. Mendez is taking a break after cooking lunch for half a dozen visitors from Ushuaia.

She used to work with Chilean fishers and is sorry for those who have lost their livelihoods, but grateful too that Argentina was able to learn lessons from their experience and prevent the salmon farms from coming to the Beagle Channel.

“If salmon farming had been allowed here it would have been a betrayal of the fishing community and the ecosystem as a whole,” she says.