Talarico’s Voting History Sheds Light On Anti-Meat Activism

With the Texas Senate race heating up, one vote from Democrat James Talarico’s record in the state House may come back to bite him as he tries to make himself more palatable to voters. 

While in the state House, Talarico voted against a bipartisan bill championed by ranchers to ban the sale of lab-grown “meat” in Texas. The bill, which became law in September 2025, was a significant win for the Texas cattle industry, which exports about $1 billion in beef annually. 

The bill, passed in May 2025, imposes a two-year moratorium on “offering for sale and the sale of cell-cultured protein for human consumption.” As 14 Democrats joined 85 Republicans in the state House to pass the measure, Talarico voted against it. 

Throughout his Senate campaign, Talarico has been dogged by accusations of veganism based on his history of anti-meat statements. The controversy led him to stage photo ops eating meat and making proclamations that his campaign “runs on barbecue.”

Talarico’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether he stands by his vote and his current stance on lab-grown meat.

While lab-grown meat is a favorite staple of Left-wing climate groups, cattle ranchers believe that it undercuts their livelihoods and argue that the product is largely untested. The Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, an industry group, backed the moratorium on lab-grown meat and recently endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running against Talarico. 

“Ranchers across Texas work tirelessly to raise healthy cattle and produce high-quality beef,” Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association President Carl Ray Polk Jr. said after the bill won final passage. “Our association is grateful for those legislators who voted in support of this legislation and understood the core of this bill, to protect our consumers, the beef industry and animal agriculture.”

Cattle ranchers in Texas oversee about 14% of the American cattle population, with over 12.2 million head of cattle in the state. 

During one of his previous campaigns for state House, Talarico said that people should eat less meat to reduce “climate change” and said his campaign was “officially” a “non-meat campaign.” 

“It is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption, and that we try to respect animals in all aspects of society,” a masked Talarico said in 2022. “And so I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. So we have, we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”

The ultra-woke church Talarico attends in Austin encourages its congregants to “eat a plant-based diet for the planet’s health and yours.”

President Donald Trump roasted Talarico earlier this year for his apparent vegan flip-flop. 

“I’ll tell you what I do think — I think the Democrats have a weird, a weird candidate. Six genders, a real hit on Jesus,” Trump told reporters in May on Air Force One. “I mean, this guy is bad news with his mask from relatively recently, and he’s a vegan. He’s a vegan. All of a sudden, he’s not a vegan. He was a vegan, now all of a sudden he’s not.”

The cattle industry is not the only state economic powerhouse Talarico has upset. He took shots at the oil and gas industry in a 2020 Zoom meeting hosted by the Sierra Club, saying the “industry is not gonna last” and compared it to making cassette tapes in the 1980s.

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