In FERN’s latest story, published with Fast Company, reporter Joe Fassler explains how Vow, an Australian startup, is reinventing lab-grown meat by ignoring chicken and beef and focusing on what CEO George Peppou calls “weird meat.”
Fassler writes: “Weird meat is a departure from what the cell-meat industry originally promised. It’ll be expensive, to start with. (As of November, Vow was selling its quail parfait to four restaurants in Singapore for $100 a pound.) It’ll feature tastes and textures that don’t exist in nature. And it’ll be made from animals that people aren’t used to eating. Think crocodile, peacock, songbird, and more. Last year, Vow made international news after its “mammoth meatball”—an enormous, one-off prototype that mixed elephant cells and prehistoric woolly mammoth DNA—led to a viral clip on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Ultimately, Vow hopes building a robust luxury market for weird meats will give it a chance to gradually lower costs further through continued R&D—though it’ll first need to normalize the idea of eating offbeat species. As I look down at my quail parfait, it strikes me that I’ve never eaten quail before. I take a bite, and the spread is as light and melty as whipped butter, with subtle mineral notes I associate with liver. It represents the start of a new, ambiguous era—one in which cultivated meat will finally be available, just not in the way anyone expected.”