They’ve been warning us that this was coming for years and now it’s finally arrived. This week the US Agriculture Department authorized two California companies to sell “lab-grown meat” to restaurants. Approval for sales to supermarkets is expected to follow. The FDA had previously declared the products “safe to eat” earlier this year. Upside Foods and Good Meat will initially be selling only “chicken,” but we have been assured that “beef” is on the way also. The so-called meat is grown in vats using living cells from actual chickens. (I bet your taste buds are watering already.) It is then processed into shapes that allegedly resemble typical chicken parts. And you can supposedly cook it just as you would a normal chicken. (Associated Press)

For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.

The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.

The reasons for experimenting in this fashion run along two lines, both of which are offered in the AP article. Some claim that they are trying to prevent “harm to animals.” That sounds nice enough and I’m certainly opposed to animal cruelty. But humans have been raising and consuming animals ever since we made it past the hunter-gatherer stage. In modern times, the United States has laws to make animal processing routines as humane as can be managed. And not to sound too cold-hearted, but if the cows didn’t want to be eaten, they should have evolved and developed better offensive and defensive weapons systems before we did.

The other argument is, of course, climate change. Liberals have been complaining about animal agriculture for a long time now, blaming farting cows for whatever percentage of carbon emissions they supposedly cause. Besides, if you can wipe out all of those farms, you can build new shelters for the now-homeless farmers and others.

The AP warns people not to expect to see this lab-grown chicken in their local grocery store any time soon. The product is still massively expensive compared to actual chicken, so it’s going to be a niche market for more upscale consumers for the foreseeable future. It remains unclear how or even if these companies will be able to expand production to make the products affordable at scale. But don’t worry. The “edible” bugs are supposedly far less expensive and they’re already showing up in stores.

So the million-dollar question about this fake chicken is how it tastes and if anyone would want to eat it. The AP tasked JoNel Aleccia with testing it out. And yes, he used the mandatory joke about how it “tastes like chicken.” He first tried the product from Upside Foods.

The aroma was enticing, just like any filet cooked in butter would be. And the taste was light and delicate with a tender texture, just like any chicken breast I’d make at home – if, that is, I were a chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America.

Next, he tried the “chicken” from Good Meat.

The taste was richer than a chicken breast, more like the dark meat of a thigh. And the texture was both tender and chewy, like a well-cooked chicken thigh should be.

That, says [Chef] Tyndall, is the whole point.

“It needs to be as lifelike as possible for it to catch on,” he said.

Yes. If there’s one thing I’m looking for when I take my wife to a restaurant, it’s for the food to be “as lifelike as possible.”

So it sounds as if someone found the food to be edible and mostly the same as typical chicken meat. And I suppose that makes sense. Unlike the experimental horror shows being created from plant-based compounds and who-knows-what-else, this is being “grown” from actual chicken cells. I doubt I’ll be trying it any time soon, but if you want to, help yourself. But from the sound of this report, it won’t be replacing actual chickens for a very long time, if ever. It requires a massive industrial effort to recreate what actual chickens do naturally at the cost of little more than some birdseed and cracked corn.