Culture(d) Wars: Reciprocal Permission Structures in Cultured Meat Bans

Abstract

“Cultured meat” is an emerging food biotechnology with potential to disrupt the animal agriculture industry by creating animal protein from only an animal’s cells. Despite the industry’s relative infancy, myriad legislation has been introduced to stifle or ban the technology outright. Using bans in Florida and Alabama as case studies, we identify two mutually reinforcing discourse communities that allow the political right to enact anti-cultured legislation despite such laws explicitly stifling free enterprise, a core conservative value. We dub these top-down (legislative) and bottom-up (social media) discourses reciprocal permission structures, in which rhetors of disparate social capital advance a populist conspiracism inherently suspicious of technical rhetoric for social change.