Conservatives want the government to dictate what you can and cannot eat. Or so Republican policymaking increasingly suggests.

Earlier this month, Montana and Nebraska became the latest US states to ban lab-grown meat (also known as “cellular meat” or “cultivated meat”). Unlike plant-based meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger, lab-grown meat consists of actual animal tissue, but made without slaughtering animals. Instead, scientists take a sample of animal cells and feed them amino acids, salts, vitamins, and other nutrients until they grow into edible beef, pork, or poultry.

This technology isn’t yet commercially viable. You can’t buy cellular meat at a grocery store. And if you could, a serving might cost you the bulk of your savings.

Nevertheless, self-styled champions of free enterprise in Nebraska, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Wyoming have all sought to stymy the manufacture and sale of cellular meat within their borders.

Although these bans are of little immediate consequence, they’re nevertheless alarming and unconscionable. Industrial agriculture as currently practiced entails the torture of billions of sentient beings. And when forced to choose between tolerating such cruelty and forfeiting cheap bacon, nearly everyone picks the former.

Lab-grown meat faces many scientific and economic hurdles to viability. But it is nevertheless our best hope for eliminating torture from our food system. And the right’s push for prohibiting the technology is fueled by little more than paranoia, greed, and cultural grievance.

The moral necessity of lab-grown meat

Human beings generally love the taste of flesh, and not without reason. Meat is highly nutrient-dense, providing protein and essential amino acids, as well as vitamins and minerals that can be challenging to assemble from plant-based foods. The slaughter and consumption of animals has also been a central feature of human cultures, from the Paleolithic to the present day.

Of course, for much of our species’ history, meat was scarce. Raising livestock requires more resources than cultivating wheat or rice, which has long rendered highly carnivorous diets unattainable for ordinary people. As soon as humans can afford to eat meat regularly, however, most do so: Around the world, meat consumption rises almost linearly with increases in national income.

This relationship may break down some in the wealthiest nations. Past a certain level of affluence, people seem to give more weight to environmental and medical arguments against heavy meat consumption — Germany, for example, has managed to modestly decrease its per capita meat........

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