First Amendment Food Fight: Big Ag’s Attempts to Stifle Consumer Choice

When you think about attacks on the First Amendment — which provides our constitutional right to free speech — your next thought probably isn’t about food. But, in recent years, attacking free speech has apparently become a primary strategy by Big Ag to keep its stranglehold on the food marketplace.

Walking down the grocery aisle, we’ve all noticed there are more products today to choose from than ever before. One type of food becoming more prevalent is plant-based alternatives to traditional meat — like veggie burgers or vegan sausage. People switch to these options for any number of reasons, whether dietary or because they see these options align with their values, including protecting the animals or the environment. And people have the right to make that choice. Except…since 2018, the $269 billion industrial animal agriculture industry has been seeking to stifle this new competition in the market.

At the federal level, industrial animal agriculture lobbying groups have petitioned for regulation of less cruel food alternatives. For example, the National Milk Producers Federation urged the Food & Drug Administration to charge plant-based milks as “imitation” products. And the National Cattlemen’s Association petitioned the Department of Agriculture to redefine “meat” and “beef” to exclude plant-based products — and attempted to push state agencies to apply existing federal regulations improperly (which ALDF helped defeat).

Working in concert with sympathetic state legislators, Big Ag has also spearheaded a number of pieces of state-based legislation aimed at handicapping their plant-based competition — either by prohibiting them from using “meat” terminology in names like “veggie burger” or “vegan sausage,” or by requiring plant-based meat companies to jump through impossible hoops of duplicative and inconsistent labeling disclosures — all to avoid the implausible case of a consumer thinking that “veggie” or “vegan” meat is somehow derived from pigs, chickens, or other animals. But the thing is, no one thinks Tofurky comes from slaughtered turkeys. It’s an imaginary problem, it flies in the face of free speech, and it harms animals in the process. So, taxpayers are now picking up the tab for states to defend these frivolous laws designed to fight a problem that doesn’t exist.

The courts — naturally — look at the evidence and the plain text of these laws and continue to either strike them down as unconstitutional or read them in a way to preclude enforcement. We believe they are seeing the situation for what it is: the actions of an industry that seemingly fears an equal playing field in the market and mistakenly thinks it can create laws to undercut its competition.

The most recent example of courts correcting laws deemed unconstitutional is Texas, courtesy of a legal challenge that the Animal Legal Defense Fund led. It started in 2023, when Texas joined the ranks of Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma in passing a law designed to impose onerous, duplicative, and inconsistent labeling requirements on plant-based meat producers, even though Texas conceded it was not aware of a single consumer being confused. The Texas law provides no clear guidance for how to “correctly” label foods. And it even could prevent plant-based food producers from selling their products on a nationwide basis by creating inconsistent laws across the country that producers could not — and would not even know how to — comply with. So we took Texas to court. And in January 2026, a federal district court ruled that Texas’s law violated the First Amendment by restricting truthful commercial speech and facially enjoined the law from being enforced. The decision was a principled correction in a world filled with unconstitutional laws proliferated by industrial animal agriculture (thanks to its apparent belief that it can bully others in the market to stay on top).

While the state of Texas has appealed our win, we remain confident in the Constitution and look forward to defending the district court’s determination before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. We hope that this case, as with others ALDF has brought, will discourage states from passing unconstitutional and protectionist laws that simply serve to waste taxpayer dollars and stifle competition. And we will keep fighting for a fair market, consumer choice, and free speech wherever these issues impact animals too.