Illinois Representative Joins Growing List of Politicians Trying to Ban Cultivated Meat

The culture wars over cultivated meat continue, with a House Representative in Illinois introducing a bill to ban these foods in the state.

And it goes on.

Two months after Florida’s ban on cultivated meat came into effect, and a month before one goes live in Alabama, Illinois has joined a number of other states to try and outlaw these proteins.

House Representative Chris Miller, a third-generation cattle farmer, has introduced HB 5872, a bill to make the sale, manufacture or distribution of cultivated meat a Class C misdemeanour.

It means that if you sell cultivated meat, you’ll be treated the same way as you would if you possessed less than 2.5g of marijuana, assaulted someone, or left a firearm in your house that could easily be accessed by a minor. The penalty can result in 30 days of jail time, and/or $1,500 in fines.

“Agriculture is big business in Illinois, and we don’t need fake meat laboratories creating a highly expensive product that tries to replicate real meat,” said Miller. “Illinois farmers know what they’re doing, and they do it well.”

Rep Miller relies on misinformation to back bill

Miller’s bill, which hasn’t been referred to any of the committees yet, calls cultivated meat “a threat to the health, safety, and welfare” of Illinois residents.

A press release on the Representative’s website explains that HB 5872 was introduced as a response to “growing concerns from the notion of replacing real meat with laboratories”, and argued that it would protect “individual’s health, farmland, and agricultural products”.

Let’s break that down. First, cultivated meat poses no health risks – if it did, the USDA and the FDA wouldn’t have deemed it safe to be sold for human consumption, as they did for Upside Foods’ and Eat Just’s chicken products last year. In fact, cultivated meat takes away any concerns about antibiotics or bacterial contamination (like E coli).

Next, to make cultivated meat, you need sugars, minerals, and other inputs, which are agricultural products. Andy Jarvis, director of the Bezos Earth Fund’s Future of Food initiative, told Green Queen in June: “This is not an anti-farmer sector; this is a sector that is using farmed products in new ways.”

And finally, the claim that this is a threat to farmland is laughable at best – research has shown that if produced by renewable energy, cultivated meat uses 90% less land than conventional beef. It has also been found to be three times more efficient at turning crops into meat than even the “most efficient” livestock.

“The ideology behind cultivating animal cells to improve carbon emissions is mind-blowing,” said Miller, with complete disregard for the misinformation he was spewing. Explaining how cultivated meat is made, his announcement took inspiration from an account of Upside Foods’ process by Wired. The publication revealed that instead of producing its meat in bioreactors, the Californian startup was at the time primarily relying on plastic roller bottles.

Miller, however, contorted the two to say that cultivated meat is produced in bioreactors, and employees “grow sheets of tissue in plastic flasks, called roller bottles, and combine them to create larger pieces of chicken or beef”. He’s also using one company’s process as a yardstick for the entire industry.

It highlights a startling reality: policymakers are trying to suppress consumer choice by outlawing food without actually knowing how it’s truly made. Alabama’s bill was also similarly built on misinformation.

It’s all about politics

“Here in Illinois, farmers work hard to raise cattle and produce some of the finest meat on the market,” said Miller. In January alone, a local company recalled nearly 7,000 lbs of raw ground beef thought to be contaminated with E. coli.

“My legislation would protect farmers and the high-quality products they help produce to feed families across the nation,” Miller added, regurgitating an argument made by almost everyone who’s tried to ban cultivated meat.

Legal challenges against cultivated meat have become a trend in the US, particularly among Republicans. But for all the talk about protecting the state’s animal agriculture industry, most of these efforts come from legislators who themselves are livestock farmers, or belong to a family of meat producers. So really, they’re looking out for themselves.

Only last week, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed an executive order prohibiting state agencies from procuring cultivated meat, ordering contractors to not discriminate against conventional meat producers, and calling for restrictions on how cultivated meat is labelled in stores – despite it never appearing on any supermarket shelf in the US.

Pillen, part of a pork family empire in Nebraska, now wants to ban cultivated meat in the 2025 legislative session. Similar efforts are ongoing in Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

Illinois was set to be the site for Upside Foods’ industrial-scale manufacturing plant before the project was put on pause. But now, the company has sued Florida for its ban, calling it unconstitutional. Whether such pushback would deter Miller – who has previously been censured by his colleagues for attending Donald Trump’s rally that preceded January 6 – only time will tell.

But as November 5 draws closer, Donald Trump incoherently tries to talk about plant-based bacon, and his running mate JD Vance denounces ‘soy boys’, the Republican strategy seems to be clear: nothing is more American than red meat, no matter how bad it is for you or the planet.

Let’s cut the crap and call these bans what they really are: political stunts hoping to sway voters with misinformation and no regard for their own freedom to choose what they eat.