Don’t chicken out of eating lab-made meat. It could change the world.

It tasted like chicken because, well, it was chicken. Lab-grown meat is not a meat substitute created entirely from soy or other vegetarian ingredients. Rather, it’s actual animal flesh, made from cells harvested from live animals (such as cows or chickens) that are cultivated in a lab and grown into edible tissue – maybe a chicken cutlet or a meatball.

The version I tasted, produced by Upside Foods, was a shredded chicken product that is awaiting safety approval from the Food and Drug Administration. An Upside chef prepared it in his colleague’s New York apartment and served it three ways: on a Waldorf salad, as a breakfast sandwich with egg and chicken sausage, and as an empanada.

The end result was … kinda boring, honestly?

Just a basic, normal, chicken-y chicken, not so different from the thousands of conventionally produced chickens I’ve eaten over my lifetime. If I’d been served any of these Upside dishes blind at a local sandwich shop, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual.

That’s what Upside Foods is aiming for. Consumers might already be weirded out by the prospect of eating lab-grown animal products, so the ideal product should taste completely normal – or both remarkable and unremarkable, as Upside’s chief operating officer, Amy Chen, puts it.

The downside of this chicken is that, while it blended in well when chopped and mixed with sausage seasoning or a big heap of mayo, the meat probably wasn’t high-quality enough to be served as a stand-alone gourmet dish. That’s a problem, given how much it costs to produce. (Chen declined to name a specific price per pound but said the company’s chicken sells at “a significant premium to organic.”)

For now, only higher-end restaurants with richer, more adventurous customers can likely afford this novelty, and Michelin-starred restaurants aren’t selling a ton of breakfast sandwiches. The places that do serve the kinds of dishes this chicken seems suited for – the sandwich shops and bodegas of the world – cannot afford such gastronomic extravagance.

The lab-cultivated meat industry is still young, though. The hope is that as technologies improve, the product will get not only tastier but also more affordable.

The Upside chicken I tasted is already more scalable than the company’s first-generation chicken, which federal regulators approved for production and sale last year. (Another lab-cultivated chicken product from Good Meats and its manufacturing partner, Joinn Biologics, was also approved last year. Neither chicken is available in stores).

The companies have another problem to overcome: Politicians. Rather than promising a lab-grown chicken in every pot, red-state politicians have been picking fights with these foodie futurists – partly to feed the culture wars, partly to shield the existing agricultural industry from competition. Florida and Alabama recently made it a crime to manufacture, distribute or sell lab-cultivated meat within their borders. Upside is challenging the Florida law as unconstitutional.

Taking away consumers’ choice to eat these products, including those deemed safe by the FDA, is fusty, anti-freedom and foolish. The next iteration of this technology could change the world. We should want some of that innovation here in America.

Some benefits are obvious: Cell-cultured meats produced at scale would limit the suffering of farm animals. These animal tissues may never completely replace conventionally grown meat or fish, but global meat consumption is expected to skyrocket in the decades ahead. Replacing at least some of that growth with lab-cultivated meat would limit the need for slaughter.

Then there’s the planet. The cultivation of meat from livestock accounts for 12 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, a consequence of feed production, manure management and cow burps. Right now, lab-grown meat production is also quite energy-intensive. So long as some of that energy comes from fossil fuels, lab-grown meat will contribute to climate change. But again, the hope is that efficiency improvements – plus a broader global shift to renewables – will shrink the food industry’s carbon footprint.

Lab-grown meat already has one obvious advantage: “Part of the inefficiency of the current commercial agriculture system is that we grow an entire animal just to eat part of it,” Chen said. Conventionally raised livestock will always make more sense for cuisines where more of the animal is used or presented (think Thanksgiving turkey or Peking duck). But for most everyday dishes, lab-made meat could easily become the cheaper, just-as-tasty solution.

Lab-grown meats also hold the potential to reduce food insecurity, which is why countries such as China have announced strategic investments in the technology. Shifting more meat production away from farms and slaughterhouses and into sterile, gleaming labs means a country’s meat supply is less vulnerable to being wiped out by, say, swine fever. The shift could also mean fewer opportunities for animal diseases to evolve and infect humans.

Again, this is a “someday” thing. We’re not there yet. But more U.S. politicians should get on board. With this new industry’s potential for improving animal welfare, climate, food security and public health, a technological breakthrough could kill multiple birds with one stone. Or maybe, if we’re lucky, none at all.

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Reach Catherine Rampell at crampell@washpost.com.