Mark Lane: Florida fights future foods. Why?

There is probably no easier call in politics than to ban something that’s not around. This year, the Legislature passed and Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed into law bills that would ban the sale of lab-grown meat and forbid offshore wind power.

Lab-grown meat isn’t sold in Florida. It’s in the earliest stage of commercial development. It may be a thing someday. Just not in the here and now.

And the number of offshore power generators in Florida? Zero. With an additional zero now in the works.

The governor also signed a bill requiring disclaimers on political ads that use artificial intelligence. Most political ads don’t employ average intelligence, but at least here, it’s easy to see how the technology could be weaponized in the near future.

More: DeSantis panders to ranchers with Florida's lab-grown meat ban. It's bad economics.

More: Florida bans lab-grown meat. Have any other states passed their own bans against it?

And don’t forget last year’s law cracking down on monorails. That was part of the War on Disney, currently in a ceasefire.

Next, I see firm action against flying hover cars, mind probes and nano-factories that use molecular assemblers.

Your Legislature is doing what it can to hold off the possible future. Facing the present, however, just presents too many potential problems. Who wants to deal with the cost of property insurance or raise the state’s teacher pay above 50^th place among the states when you can shape the future by fighting the technologies of tomorrow?

Lab-grown meat is something I’m only aware of because I used to chuck my son’s CD of the game Civilization: Call to Power into my computer during the first years of the present century. (Gaming in the early 2000s, a simpler time.) Meat vats were a food technology that appeared in the game’s last turns, meant to represent a distant future, the Diamond Age. Meat vats gave you bonus points.

No bonus points for Florida, though. Instead, the state “is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” as the governor’s office statement defiantly declared. (Ick! Bugs!) That damn global elite again.

The same global elite that forced a lab-developed butterlike product on an unsuspecting world. Or, as the global elites prefer to call it, “margarine.” There were laws aimed against that, too, just before the turn of the previous century. A punitive federal tax discouraging its sale wasn’t repealed until the Truman administration.

When margarine was a new thing, dairy interests rushed lobbyists to state capitals to kill off this troubling new food technology. They feared it would be catastrophic for business. It turned out, though, that lab-developed spread and real butter could coexist just fine. The state bans were mostly repealed due to butter shortages in the wake of World War II.

Now it’s the cattle industry’s turn to feel sheepish about new food tech, and it is asking governments to step in. It’s not like it must fight the lab-meat lobbyists, who, conveniently enough, don’t exist. Look for similar legislation in other states. Florida is a laboratory for special-interest state government.

I don’t know if lab-grown meat will ever make it into the Publix of the future. The idea behind the potential product is to take animal cells, immerse them in a soup of nutrients, hormones and whatnot, and grow meat in a vat without an animal attached. Cut the cows, pigs, chickens and slaughterhouses out of the process, something with significant environmental benefits. Consumers who are queasy about animal treatment might feel better buying the stuff.

An interesting idea. Would consumers like the taste? We don’t know yet. Would there be bad health effects? None have been detected so far. The FDA and USDA have approved early versions. Is there a market for it? To be seen.

For a party that is supposed to believe in the benefits of a free market and consumer choice, this is an odd stand for Republicans to take. Myself, I’ll be interested to see what the future holds and if it tastes like chicken.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mark Lane: Florida fights future foods. Why?