A group of scientists from ETH Zurich and FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland recently filed a patent for a process that makes chocolates shimmer in rainbow colors without using food coloring.

The story of shimmering rainbow chocolate began on the corridors of a university building, when food scientist Patrick Rühs, materials scientist Etienne Jeoffroy and physicist Henning Galinski started chatting about chocolate during their coffee break. The main focus of their discussion is whether it would be possible to make chocolate in other colors than brown and white, and if so, how. Intrigued by the complexity of the topic, they started looking into chocolate, its properties and what makes it brown. Then they started conducting playful experiments in the kitchen of ETH University.

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The ripe berries of the genipa tree, called genipapo, have long been used throughout Central and South America to make syrups and liquors, but for a few years now unripe genipapo berries have become highly sought after for their ability to turn foods blue.

The coloring properties of unripe genipapo berries have been documented since the colonization of South America, when Europeans reported its use by local communities like the Tupinambás and the Pataxós as a temporary tattoo dye, but it wasn’t until 2014 that people learned about its potential to turn food blue as well. It was then that professor and biologist Valdely Kinupp published his book, Unconventional Food Plants in Brazil, where he detailed a process for extracting an edible blue pigment from genipapo berries. Natural blue pigments are very rare in the food industry, so Kinupp’s discovery caused quite a stir which eventually turned into a blue food craze.

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A Western Australian man claims to have successfully cooked a whole pork roast by leaving it inside a car for about 10 hours on a very hot day. Although he conducted the experiment for fun, the man did warn people not to leave their kids or pets in their cars during the summer.

Stu Pengelly, from Perth, in Western Australia, decided to see what would happen if he left a 1,5 kg pork roast on the front seat of his old Datsun for ten hours on a hot summer day. He put the meat in at around 7 a.m, when the thermometer showed a bearable 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) inside the beat-up vehicle, but by midday, temperatures reached a scorching 81 degrees Celsius (more than 177 Fahrenheit). Pengelly monitored the temperature throughout the day, and when the ten hours were up, he took the pork, sliced it and even took a few bites to show that it was cooked.

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Airplane food isn’t exactly considered “haute cuisine”, but one budget airline is betting that people love its airplane food so much that they’d be willing to pay for it at restaurants on the ground.

AirAsia, the largest budget carrier in Asia, has announced plans to open over 100 restaurants globally within the next five years. The restaurants will be offering the same menu AirAsia sells on flights, including chicken rice, the airline’s signature Pak Nasser’s Nasi Lemak dish, pineapple fish, noodle chicken inasal with garlic rice, and onde-onde cake . The move is part of AirAsia’s plans to become a lifestyle brand, and the company hopes that its Asia dishes will make people choose it over Western competitors.

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In case the title of this article wasn’t clear enough, the turkey in the picture below ins’t actually raw meat, skin and bones, but an edible cake made of sponge, butter cream and marzipan.

Even knowing that you’re looking at an expertly made optical illusion, it’s still pretty hard to believe that it’s not really a turkey ready to go into the oven. Everything from the pink, plucked skin, to the properly-proportioned wings and drumsticks was perfectly executed by English cake artist Sarah Hardy. Using her experience as a wax sculpture artist, Hardy is able to mold layers of sponge cake, chocolate and sugar or marzipan icing into all kinds of realistic designs, from human organs to birds and frogs.

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Just a week after Brooklyn-based startup Air Co. unveiled its carbon-negative, air-based vodka, a California start-up announced a new type of “meatless meat” made from air.

Appropriately named Air Protein, the Bay Area company allegedly used technology developed by NASA, to transform carbon dioxide (CO2) into protein, the same way plants do. During the 1960’s, the U.S. space agency started looking for a way to feed astronauts on a year-long mission by relying on the one resource its crew produced in abundance – CO2. During their research, scientists discovered a class of microbes called hydrogenotrophs able to convert carbon dioxide into protein. The resulting powder could be used to create pastas and shakes, but Air Protein now wants to use it to create a meat alternative.

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If you’re keen on trying the blackest coffee around, you may want to give the Matte Black Latte at Round K cafe in New Your City a Try. As the owner of the place puts it, “it’s black like my soul”.

When people say they want their coffee black, they usually mean they want it with no cream or sugar, but Round K owner, Ockhyeon Byeon, wanted to give it a more literal meaning. To him, black coffee was just a dark brown, so he started thinking of ways to make the popular drink actually black. At first, he used different types of activated charcoal, which we’ve seen used in many other goth treats, like pitch black fish and chips, or jet black cheddar cheese, but then he settled on coconut ash, which not only gave the product its dark color, but a nutty flavor as well.

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Artisans at London-based design studio Bompass & Parr teamed up with scientists at the Aerogelex laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, to transfer the properties of the world’s lightest solid material into an edible dessert.

Aerogel was invented in 1931, by American chemist Samuel Kistler as part of a bet he made with fellow scientist Charles Learned over who could replace the water in gels with air, without causing shrinkage. With an air content of  95% – 99.8%, aerogel is recognized as the lightest solid in the world, so it made sense for designers at Bompass & Parr to try and emulate the making-of process of aerogel to create the world’s lightest dessert.

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The mud flats of Japan’s Ariake Sea are home to a creature that is reportedly as delicious as it is disgusting-looking. Introducing the “Warasubo”, an eel-like fish that for obvious reasons is known as the “Alien of Ariake Sea”.

If you’re familiar with H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph (the extraterrestrial creature featured in the ‘Alien’ movies), more specifically its iconic “inner mouth”, one look at the warasubo fish is enough to explain its comparison to the fictional alien. It literally looks like the piston-like appendage that Giger’s ferocious predator uses to pierce its victim’s bodies and even metal. The warasubo is a terrifying-looking thing, especially in dried form, which only makes its use as an ingredient for ramen and other Japanese foods that much stranger.

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Austin Davis, a 20-year-old man from Keystone Heights, Florida, claims to eaten almost nothing but macaroni and cheese for the last 17 years of his life.

We’ve featured picky eaters before, people who only enjoyed things like pizza or french fries, but Austin Davis isn’t one such person. Even if he tries eating something other than macaroni and cheese, and actually enjoys it, his body will immediately reject it and he’ll start to gag. Doctors say he is suffering from a psychological condition known as avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, where new foods trigger negative physical side-effects. This condition is often linked to traumatic events, and Davis was indeed diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and removed from his home, after being physically abused by his father. This has negatively impacted his social life as well as his eating habits, but he wants to change.

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Otafuku, one of the oldest oden restaurants in japan, has been heating up the same batch of broth every day since 1945, only adding more water to it as it evaporates. It may sound gross to most westerners, but it apparently makes oden stew taste amazing.

Oden is a traditional Japanese stew that is simmered in broth until served. It’s enjoyed by vegetable and meat lovers alike, as it can contain all kinds of ingredients, from from eggs, tofu and vegetables to shark meat, beef, fish balls and whale tongue, but the secret to its deliciousness is the broth. Many Japanese restaurants rely on master stock – a broth that has been repeatedly reused to poach or braise meats – to give their oden a rich flavor, but none have been using the same batch for longer than Otafuku, a Tokyo based eatery that has been reheating the same oden broth since the previous batch was lost in 1945.

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An Ecuadorian woman has been getting a lot of attention online for devising a very unusual yet surprisingly popular ice-cream flavor – guinea pig.

You probably know the guinea pig as a lovable house pet, but in South American countries like Ecuador, Peru or Bolivia people cook guinea pigs with salt and serve them with potatoes and peanut sauce. Still, even in these countries the idea of a guinea pig-flavored ice-cream has been causing quite a bit of eyebrow raising. People are used to the rodents as the main ingredient of traditional dishes, but ice-cream flavor? That would be like turning beef into an ice-cream flavor in the United States, not exactly the kind of business venture most people would even consider getting involved in. And yet, one Quito woman has been selling hundreds of guinea pig ice cream cones per day over the last few months, and as news of her unusual delicacy spreads around the world, demand is expected to skyrocket.

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This past summer British media reported the bizarre job ad posted by an eco-conscious couple looking to pay a chef £5,000 to prepare a wedding banquet out of roadkill.

The unusual ad, featured on Bark.com, the UK’s leading online local service marketplace, mentioned that the couple had already sourced about 20kg of roadkill, including squirrel, pheasant, rabbit, partridge and deer, and were looking for someone with experience in preparing courses out of wild meats. The ideal candidate would able to skin, butcher and joint the cuts of meat, as well as prepare them in such a way that the guests wouldn’t know what meat they were eating.

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A soon-to-be father in China recently made international news headlines after using 2,000 packets of expired instant noodles to build a playhouse for his unborn son.

Photos of the unusual playhouse went viral online quickly after being posted on social media by the builder, a certain Mr. Zhang, from Huadian county, in Northeast China’s Jilin province. He was swiftly tracked down by Chinese reporters and revealed that he had spent four days building the edible structure out of thousands of of out-of-date noodle packets fixed together with glue.

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Doctors in the UK recently reported the shocking case of a teenager whose vision has deteriorated to the point of blindness due to a poor diet based mainly on French fries, potato chips, processed meat and white bread.

The Bristol-based teenager, who preferred to remain anonymous, had reportedly been eating only French fries, Pringles chips and white bread, as well as the occasional sausage or ham slice, ever since he left primary school. His family describes him as a fussy eater who could never tolerate the texture of fruits or vegetables. He first went to see his doctors when he was 14, because he had been feeling tired and unwell, and was diagnosed with severe vitamin deficiency. The doctor put him on supplements and advised him to drastically change his diet, but he failed to do so and also neglected taking the supplements, and three years later he was diagnosed with progressive sight loss due to undernourishment.

Doctors at the Bristol Eye Hospital concluded that the teen’s poor diet caused him to suffer from nutritional optic neuropathy. This condition is treatable when diagnosed early, but in this particular case the fibers in his optic nerve had been so badly damaged that the sight loss has been deemed irreversible. As a consequence of the considerable sight loss, the now 19-year-old has quit college and is struggling to find a job.

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