It was in June of the first year in the new administration when Texas became the second state to ban cultured meat. This was achieved via a party line vote in the state legislature and it went into effect the following month. The governor signed the bill while eating a handful of beef jerky and proclaiming that Texans would no longer be threatened by the scourge of “fake meat.”
The new law not only prohibited the sale of “fake meat” within the state of Texas, it also made possession a misdemeanor. Companies selling cultivated meat products in other states were given a warning: they could either divest from their holdings or leave the state.
Within a month, California retaliated with a law banning the sale of meat, or as the governor put it in his signing statement, “dead animals.” The governor of California was now a polished, suit-wearing professional, but everyone knew that he’d spent three years in his twenties fronting a punk band called Revenge of the Chickens, known for its hard-edged, surfing-tinged anthems about the fascism of Whole Foods and “industrialized, corporatized animal genocide.” Their best-selling single was called, “Murder is Meat,” off of their concept album, “You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Cages,” which told the story of a chicken-led revolution culminating in Robespierre-style justice for human farmers.
“It really is disgusting,” the governor said as he signed the new law, “that human beings still enslave our fellow living creatures. Today, California strikes a blow against the animal cruelty industrial complex which is making America fat and depressed.”
In response, the governors of Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Tennessee issued executive orders protecting the rights of their citizens “to keep and breed animals for the purposes of consumption.” This included a provision banning the sale of cultivated meat, and making it a felony for any packaging to use the word “meat” to refer to anything which did not originally come from the slaughtering of an animal. This immediately created howls of protest from the nut industry, but these howls fell on deaf ears. “You can take my hamburger from my cold dead fingers,” said the governor of Alabama in an interview with Lara Cunningham, the top cable show host on Coyote News. “This is why we have the right to keep and bear arms.”
The entire purpose of the original ban on cultivated meat products had been to prevent just such a ban as now existed in the state of California. Fueled by theories that a vast conspiracy existed to take away the fundamental rights of each and every ordinary American to consume one hundred pounds worth of Big Macs each year, the original measure had unwittingly brought about the very dystopia its proponents feared. For now, several more states rushed to imitate California’s ban.