“This ban is a massive win for Texas ranchers, producers, and consumers,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement following the bill’s passage. “Texans have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”
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Texas joins Indiana, Mississippi, Montana and Nebraska in enacting new laws this year; Alabama and Florida did so last year. In March, the Oklahoma House approved a similar bill that did not advance out of the Senate this session.
I am sure it will enjoy economies of scale. Lab grown meat is currently something like 1000x the cost of animal-grown meat: I am confident they can get that down to 10x, maybe single digits. I am equally confident the inherent inefficiency of growing muscle cells without the integrated functions of the rest of the animal mean the lab cost will never be lower.
1,000×? That’s ancient history. In 2013, yeah, the first cultured burger was $330,000 (Wikipedia). Now?
SuperMeat is running full 25,000 L tanks at $11.79/lb (Green Queen, AgFunderNews) — that’s premium chicken territory, not sci-fi pricing.
Believer Meats is modeling $6.20/lb with TFF tech (Green Queen) — organic chicken prices.
Average industry cost right now is $17–23/lb (Katie Couric Media) and even a conservative academic model puts big-scale production at $28.50/lb (ScienceDirect). Still single-digit multiples, not thousands.
So no — we’re not talking “someday maybe.” We’re already at 2–4× conventional chicken for the best setups, and the price curve is still falling. Will it ever be cheaper than farm-grown? Maybe, maybe not — inefficiency is real. But “never” is a bet against tech that’s already crushed costs by over 99.99% in a decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosa_Meat
https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/supermeat-cultivated-lab-grown-meat-cost-process
https://agfundernews.com/supermeat-offers-glimpse-into-a-future-where-cultivated-meat-can-be-produced-at-scale-for-11-79-lb
https://katiecouric.com/news/sustainability/what-is-lab-grown-meat-benefits-and-challenges
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666154322000916