With May as Beef Month, will Laura Kelly declare a Kansas Plant-Based Meat Month?
As part of her effort to beef up her cred with the state’s cattle industry, not only did Gov. Laura Kelly just declare May to be “Beef Month,” but she went far beyond the merely symbolic gesture when she recently signed SB 261 into law. If ever there were an example of government overreach into the market with a solution in search of a problem, it’s this bill.
In short, SB 261 declares a meat analog mislabeled if the product doesn’t overtly disclose that it doesn’t include animal meat in it. The state’s Chamber of Commerce opposed this bill as clearly unnecessary state overreach, since the bill is obviously intended less to protect consumers from confusion and more to protect cattlemen from competition.
Already, animal-free meats are clearly labeled as “plant-based burgers” and so on precisely because the purveyors of these products want consumers to know why they’re better than the category incumbent. After all, plant-based meat is currently more expensive than animal-based meat, so there must be a reason consumers would want them. The fact that alt-meats typically have zero cholesterol, less saturated fat, and are lighter on the planet and animals are often among those top reasons.
Feigning that consumer confusion is the reason for the bill’s passage would be akin to arguing for putting restrictions on peanut butter packaging since the product doesn’t contain any dairy butter. Somehow consumers are able to figure out that peanut butter comes from peanuts, coconut milk comes from coconuts, hamburgers have no ham, and hot dogs don’t actually contain, well, you know.
A federal judge just struck down as unconstitutional Louisiana’s similarly protectionist alt-meat labeling law, and similar challenges are pending in Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Surely Kansas will soon join that list.
The good news is that beef is hardly Kansas’ only agricultural industry. In fact, the state grows all three of the plant-based meat industry’s top ingredients: soy, peas, and wheat. One hopes that the governor will offer support to these industries as well in her effort to promote Kansas agriculture.
Even if consumers don’t need protection from already-clear labeling on plant-based meat, the Kansas commodities that are used to make plant-based meat I’m sure wouldn’t mind the help. Maybe we’ll even see Gov. Kelly one day declare a future month as “Kansas Plant-Based Meat Month.”
Paul Shapiro is CEO of The Better Meat Co. and author of "Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World."
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Will Laura Kelly declare a Kansas Plant-Based Meat Month?
