Would you eat meat grown in stainless-steel tanks?

Vow’s foie gras is, technically, meat. But it wasn’t made with an animal. And it isn’t yet legal in Australia.

The product, which the Sydney start-up promotes as Forged Gras, comes not from a farm but from factories in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria, and is made with the cells of Japanese quail. Vow CEO George Peppou has been poaching engineers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to help build towards his lofty goal. Credit: SMH Forged Gras this week launched in high-end restaurants across Hong Kong and Singapore, an early milestone in Vow’s audacious bid to become the world’s most valuable meat company.

“This is something that has never existed in the world before,” Vow co-founder and chief executive George Peppou says. “Our goal is for diners to see forged gras on menus at top-tier restaurants, not as an alternative protein but as an exciting new meat product for meat eaters. “We’re using cell-culture technology to create products that animals and traditional farming could never produce.

” Many Australians have probably never tried foie gras, a French delicacy typically made of the liver of a duck or goose. Its production has been heavily criticised for animal welfare concerns about cases of force-feeding, with the process enlarging the duck or goose liver to about 10 times its usual volume. Not in Vow’s case.

Its cultured foie gras is produced in stainless-steel tanks at its Sydney facilities, which Peppou likens to a brewery. Quail cells are grown in a nutri.