Weird Meat

The strange future of lab-grown protein involves quail, crocodile, and woolly mammoth.

- JOE FASSLER

THE QUAIL PARFAIT glistens on my plate, smeared across a disc of fried heirloom masa. At first glance, it looks like the kind of fine-dining fare you'll find at many high-end restaurants: a rich, rosy paste topped with pickled pepper, an edible flower, and a dusting of cotija. But its conventional presentation masks a deeper truth.

This meal is unorthodox, even radical. In some ways, it's unlike anything the world has ever seen.

The parfait on my plate wasn't made in the traditional way of pâté and foie gras, from liver. It was grown from the connective tissue cells of a Japanese quail embryo harvested years ago and genetically induced to multiply forever in the

lab. And it's being served to me at a Climate Week event in New York by Joe Turner, chief financial officer of the Australian biotech startup Vow.

To call the quail "lab-grown meat" would be a misnomer. This jellylike version of quail was grown in a genuine cell-meat factory, the first and largest of its kind. Specifically, in a 30-foot-tall, 15,000liter tank at Vow's plant in Sydney, where the company can produce roughly 2,000 pounds of quail every month. That's a minuscule amount compared to volumes at conventional meat facilities but represents a huge step forward for a technology that, over the past decade, has built its reputation almost entirely on serving only tantalizing little bites at one-off press tastings.

And Vow is just getting started.

With nearly $50 million in funding from the likes of Blackbird Ventures, Prosperity7, and Toyota Ventures (which sponsored the Climate Week event), the company has just installed a second large bioreactor 20,000 liters this time, 33% bigger than the first. With both vessels online, the company estimates it will soon be cranking out 100 tons of cultivated quail each year.