The meat sizzling in the pan at the GOOD Meat test kitchen looks and smells like chicken.

But this chicken never clucked.

Instead, the meat that Sales and Marketing Chief Joshua Hyman is frying up at the company’s headquarters in Alameda, California, came in part from chicken tissue grown from a culture of chicken cells. The rest is plant-based.

“It’s really simple,” says Hyman. “You just cook it like you would cook any normal piece of conventional chicken.“

Yet in some states there’s a growing push to treat this type of meat very differently.

Earlier this year Florida and Alabama passed bans on cultivated meat – or meat grown from cells – while Iowa passed restrictions on its sale and labeling. And bans have been proposed in at least six other states, including Nebraska and Illinois.

Josh Tetrick, GOOD Meat’s CEO and co-founder, calls such bans “political calculus.” He said politicians in some states are trying to make cultivated meat a wedge issue.

“It’s not ideal, that it's become sort of a cultural thing in those states,” Tetrick said. “But my hope is, as is usually the case, if you make something that most Americans and consumers really want to buy, they'll do it, and the politicians will adjust.”