On Wednesday, Florida became the first US state to ban the production and sale of lab-grown, or “cell-cultivated” meat.

“Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said before signing SB 1084 into law. “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”

Alabama is on the cusp of passing similar legislation.

Cell-cultivated meat is different from products made by companies like Impossible Foods that use plant ingredients to mimic meat. Instead, cell-cultivated meat is real meat, but made without slaughtering an animal. It’s produced by taking a small sample of animal cells and feeding them a mix of amino acids, sugars, salts, vitamins, and other ingredients for a few weeks until it grows into edible meat.

The Florida law’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Danny Alvarez, had claimed the novel technology’s “unknowns are so great,” despite a multiyear review from the US Agriculture Department and US Food and Drug Administration that deemed products from two cell-cultivated meat startups safe to eat.

Florida state Rep. Tyler Sirois, another Republican who introduced a similar bill late last year, stated a different — and perhaps more honest — motivation for banning cell-cultivated meat: to protect the state’s farmers from competition. “Farming and cattle are incredibly important industries to Florida,” Sirois said in an interview with Politico in November.

Sirois also called cell-cultivated meat an “affront to nature and creation.” I wonder if he would say the same about some of the pervasive practices used in livestock production — like extreme confinement, feeding pigs feces, and grinding up live male chicks, to name just a few.