Yesterday (13 August), the US Institute for Justice – a national nonprofit public interest law firm – announced that it is partnering with Upside Foods to challenge Florida’s law prohibiting the manufacture, distribution or sale of cultivated meat.

Upside has filed a legal complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida, calling Florida’s SB 1084 ‘unconstitutional’. This injunction comes just 42 days after the ban in Florida came into effect.

In a statement on social media, Upside Foods said: “We’ve always thought it was clucked up that Florida’s politicians want to choose what you eat. We disagree. What you eat should be your choice – not something determined by special interests.”

Upside’s cultivated chicken has been deemed safe and approved for sale by the FDA and USDA. “We should trust their judgment more than inexperienced and uninformed politicians,” the statement added.

Upside Foods’ actions against the ban

So far, Upside Foods has:

📣 Started a petition against the ban

🤝 Worked behind the scenes to push back before the law went into effect

🌴 Held a tasting event days before the law went into effect to give Floridians a chance to try cultivated meat

Paul Sherman, senior attorney at the Institute of Justice, said in a press conference that the ban had ‘nothing to do with protecting public health and safety...Florida’s law is a transparent example of economic protectionism. It was passed following intense lobbying by cattle interests, and its protectionist purpose was no secret.”

Who, what, where, when, why?

This comes after Florida governor Ron DeSantis's announcement on 1 May that the legislation made it a second-degree misdemeanour to manufacture, transport, commercialise or sell cell-based meat within Florida, with penalties of $5,000 in fines, 60 days in jail and businesses having their licenses revoked.

At the time, DeSantis said: “What we’re protecting here is the industry against acts of man, against an ideological agenda that wants to finger agriculture as the problem, that views things like raising cattle as destroying our climate...the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.”

He continued: “The bill that I’m going to sign today is going to say, basically, take your fake, lab-grown meat elsewhere. We’re not doing that in the state of Florida...This is not just being done willy-nilly. They want to do this stuff in a lab to be able to wipe the people sitting here out of business. We will not let that happen in the great state of Florida.”

Who are the defendants?

The listed defendants include Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, Attorney General Ashley Moody, and state attorneys from four of the biggest jurisdictions in Florida: Jack Campbell in the Second Judicial Circuit; Bruce Bartlett in the Sixth Judicial Circuit; Andrew Bain in the Ninth Judicial Circuit; and Katherine Fernandez Rundle in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit.

Wilton Simpson said yesterday on X (formerly Twitter): “This lawsuit is ridiculous. Lab-grown ‘meat’ is not proven to be safe enough for consumers and it is being pushed by a liberal agenda to shut down farms. Food security is a matter of national security, and our farmers are the first line of defence.”

“As Florida’s Commissioner of Agriculture, I will fight every day to protect a safe, affordable, and abundant food supply. States are the laboratory of democracy, and Florida has the right to not be a corporate guinea pig. Leave the Frankenmeat experiment to California.”

Key players in the legal challenge

On the conference call organised by the Institute for Justice yesterday, an attorney with the group dismissed the safety concerns expressed by Simpson (see Paul Sherman’s quote at the top of this story).

The lawsuit says that the ban violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution because “it is expressly pre-empted by federal law regulating meat and poultry products,” Sherman added. “SB 1084 separately violates the dormant aspect of the Commerce Clause, because it was enacted with the express purpose of insulating Florida agricultural businesses from innovative, out-of-state competition like Upside. This Court should thus declare SB 1084 unconstitutional and enjoin its operation.”

Institute for Justice attorney Suranjan Sen said in a written statement: “For the same reason that California cannot ban orange juice made from oranges grown in Florida, Florida cannot ban Upside’s meat. A major purpose for enacting the Constitution was to prevent exactly this kind of economic protectionism, ensuring that all Americans can benefit from a free and open national market. Florida cannot ban products that are lawful to sell throughout the rest of the country simply to protect in-state businesses from honest competition.”

Uma Valeti, CEO and founder of Upside Foods, said it was ‘surreal’ watching the Florida Legislature debate the bill.

On the call yesterday, Valeti stated: “I watched the whole session, and I thought this is probably what it probably looked like several hundred years ago when people were challenging nearly every transformative innovation that came into the world and innovators had to fight and fight and fight. I felt like I was watching an old boys club trying to have a privileged group protected and protecting an incumbent industry. I just couldn’t believe that was happening at this day and age.”

Florida is the first state in the country to ban cultivated meat. Alabama will become the second when its ban goes into effect on 1 October.

Attorneys for the Institute for Justice say they hope to file for a preliminary injunction in federal court to stop the law from being enforced by the end of this week.

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