Over the last year, I’ve gotten quite comfortable ragging on Ron DeSanctimonious—sorry, Ron DeSantis—especially about those cowboy boots and that strange Chucky smile-type thing he kept doing every time a camera was pointed at his face. But now that he’s put down the blind, three-legged horse that was his presidential campaign, it’s much easier to praise him for the good things he’s done and is doing as governor of Florida. And one very good thing Ron DeSantis has done recently is to ban the production and sale of so-called lab-grown meat in the Sunshine State.

He did this back at the beginning of May, to a certain amount of fanfare. Under the new law, anybody who produces or sells lab-grown meat in Florida will be subject to a second-degree misdemeanor charge.

After putting his signature to the Republican-led bill, DeSantis said that his aim in doing so was to protect his state’s “vibrant agricultural industry” against globalist elites who want to finger traditional farming, especially livestock-farming, for climate change and abolish it.

“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 uses things like raising cattle as destroying our climate,” DeSantis said.

“This will be people who will lecture the rest of us about things like global warming, they will say you can’t drive an internal combustion vehicle, they will say agriculture is bad, meanwhile, they’re flying to Davos in their private jets.”

Of course, the liberal media were on hand to say that the governor’s claims were all sound and fury—just another “culture war” distraction designed to rile up the Republican base, which is full of ignorant white dudes who associate the consumption of meat with outdated, toxic notions of masculinity and potency. At this point, such criticisms might as well be boilerplate.

But DeSantis is right. There is an ideological agenda at work here, and if it succeeds, we’re going to be farming and eating very differently in the near future.

It’s a central plank of my work, and of the work of great scientists like Weston A. Price, that humans need to eat nutrient-dense animal foods—things like liver and butter and eggs and milk—to fulfil their physical and mental potential. Without them, we simply don’t develop properly. If we want to be human, we must fight back against determined attempts to deprive us of these essential foods. As far as I can see, one of the most powerful ways we can do that is through laws designed to protect traditional agriculture and ensure animal products remain on the shelves.

Now, I’m normally not one to argue for government regulation of what people eat. In fact, I’d be the first to say that government intervention in people’s diets has been a disaster over the last century. Take the lipid-heart hypothesis, for example. With the backing of margarine money and a government that was desperate to do something about rising rates of heart disease, the American Heart Association and a quack “nutritionist” called Ancel Keys helped convince the medical establishment and the general public that the cause of heart disease was the consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat. This led to an unprecedented shift in diets in America and throughout the developed world, as people abandoned the traditional animal foods that had sustained their ancestors and upon which true health must be built.

Scientists at the time knew that the lipid-heart hypothesis was baloney—Keys suffered ridicule at the hands of his colleagues when he first presented it to them—but with enough money, you can make just about anything stick. The lipid-heart hypothesis became the credo quia absurdum est—the “I believe it because it’s absurd”—of modern healthcare, an article of faith to which government experts, scientists and physicians held firm, even as evidence piled up that it was actually harming us. Look up the Minnesota Coronary Experiment if you want to see the lengths to which scientists went to avoid confronting the evidence right before their eyes.

Seventy years later, the lipid-heart hypothesis has been debunked, but its baleful effects remain. We now live in a world where people dread to consume even a single egg because of the cholesterol contained in the yolk, but happily glug litres a week of vegetable and seed oils that were once considered fit only to be used as industrial lubricants and paint thinners. A world where corporations control the food supply to an unprecedented extent, and a majority of the population derive the majority of their calories from ultra-processed foods of a kind that never existed before. Illness is now the norm, rather than the exception.

So, yes, we need to be very careful. But in the case of what’s often called the “plant-based agenda,” I think we need all the help we can get. The plant-based agenda—the aim to get us all, and I mean all of us, to adopt a plant-based diet, in order to save the planet from climate change and feed a massively expanded global population—is not being driven by consumer choice. Quite the opposite. A decade of consumer data and research show, categorically, that ordinary people do not want to eat plant-based meat or “alternative proteins” like farmed crickets. They don’t want to eat lab-grown meat made with animal cells that are functionally the same as tumors. Who would!?

An amusing study conducted during the pandemic showed that 73% of Australian men would happily lose ten years off their lives rather than give up meat. People would rather die than eat this crap.

So, producers and investors have given up on consumers leading the way to a glorious plant-based future. Instead, they’re placing their reliance on economic factors, especially inflation, and also government regulations, including things like “meat taxes” and “carbon taxes,” to create a consumer landscape where choice has been radically curtailed. They’re banking huge amounts of money on a near future where people don’t really have a choice not to eat these novel products. If you want a burger, it will have to be a plant-based one or one made with lab-grown meat or insects. Meat simply won’t be an affordable option for you.

This explains why, despite the very public disasters suffered by industry big beasts like Beyond Meat and Impossible, which have seen their share prices crater, money keeps pouring in to startups and the broader industry. They’re playing a long game. Corporations, even “traditional” meat producers like Tyson Foods, have everything to gain from a plant-based future, because they can patent the products and own them in ways it’s impossible to own a burger or steak.

Alabama has already followed DeSantis’s lead and enacted its own ban on lab-grown meat. Arizona and Tennessee are also considering similar legislation. This really could be the beginning of a nationwide movement to fight back against these “foods of the future” nobody has asked for and nobody wants. That’s exactly what I advocate for in my most recent book The Eggs Benedict Option: a political movement that recognises the central role of food not just in individual health but the health of the collectivity—of the nation. A nation is only as strong as the individuals it’s made up of. It’s that simple.

So here’s to Ron. The aptly named meatball really has done good.