Paying $100 for a donut seems crazy, but Donutopia is no ordinary confectionery, it’s a culinary masterpiece covered in 24-karat gold flakes and edible sugar diamonds. These treats are made with the finest ingredients, including $39 Bling H2O water.

“Each one takes three to five hours to make,” says Jeanne Kaminski, co-owner of Dolicious Donuts in West Kelowna, Canada, where the delectable donuts were invented. They were inspired by a loyal customer who wanted to use one of their creations to propose to his girlfriend. He asked for a cream-filled Bismarck donut to act as a pillow for the engagement ring, but they decided to make him something truly impressive. The first Donutopia got such positive feedback that they decided to include it on the menu.

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If you love odd culinary combinations, then the ‘dausage’ is just the thing for you. The half-donut, half-sausage is a savory-sweet mash-up of pork or beef and jam or custard, invented by web developer and food lover Liam Bennett.

“I was inspired to invent the dausage by the success of the cronut and the duffin,” the 37-year-old from Wales said. “I love jam donuts, and I really love those products, but I wanted to make something a bit different, so I came up with the idea of trying a sausage. I was trying to think what else you could mix with a donut. I was looking at things that go well with sweet things, duck with plum sauce. I thought I’d give the sausage a go because, well, I eat sausages.”

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Lots of people love Chipotle, but how many eat there every single day? According to recent news reports at least two. Mark Rantal and Andrew Hawryluk have been at the popular Mexican grill for over 100 days straight!

Rantal, 30, who has been eating at the restaurant for 108 days now, said he got into the practice by accident. “On Monday, I decided to get Chipotle and on Tuesday, I made the same decision, then got lunch with my friend there on Wednesday,” he told reporters. “We laughed about it at lunch and he asked how long I thought I could go. And that began the thought.”

Soon, Rantal hit one week, and then a month, and then he just kept going from there. “Every time I hit a milestone, it was very easy and convenient to imagine hitting the next,” he said. And he got the same meal every single time – a burrito bowl with white rice, pinto beans, fajitas, sofritas, mild salsa, corn, medium salsa, cheese and lettuce.

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Every year, during the rainy season, trillions of midges – small flies – rise from the water of Lake Victoria, in Africa, and fly in giant swarms that are said to be so dense they can suffocate a person. However, for the people living on the shores of the great lake, they are just a welcome source of protein.

Some bird species migrate to Lake Victoria during the rainy season so they can take advantage of this free feast. The flies create a sort of constantly buzzing living smog and cover every available surface as they break off from their mating ritual. But no matter how many of them are gobbled up by birds and other natural predators, there are always more than enough for the locals. As disgusting as eating flies may seem, the reality is they make up a huge quantity of biomass equivalent with large herds of big game. People living on the shores of Lake Victoria simply can’t ignore the nutritious protein flying all around them, so they catch the flies and cook them as charcoal-black fly burgers.

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Researchers at Oregon State University have made the mother of all discoveries – they’ve recently patented a strain of seaweed that’s not only rich in protein, but tastes remarkably like delicious bacon when cooked.

Dulse (Palmaria sp.) is a red marine algae that grows along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines and is sold for up to $90 a pound in dried form as a cooking ingredient or dietary supplement. However, Chris Langdon and his colleagues at Oregon State University have patented a new strain of dulse that’s bound to revolutionize the health food industry. Not only is it an excellent source of minerals, vitamins and antioxidants and contains up to 16 percent protein in dry weight, but it actually tastes amazing. How amazing? Bacon amazing, according to Langdon.

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A video of a piece of beef twitching as if it were alive has been doing the rounds online for the last two weeks creeping out viewers and even turning some of them into vegetarians.

Chinese meat has been getting a lot of news coverage lately. Just last week we reported about the now-famous “zombie meat” – cheap meat as old as 40 years smuggled into the country and sold to small restaurants – and these days everyone’s talking about “Frankenstein meat”. Luckily, this one is actually safe for human consumption, although it looks arguably creepier than zombie meat.

So what’s this all about, then? Around two weeks ago, Cheng Tan, a woman from Shandong Province, China, bought a piece of fresh meat, and just as she was getting ready to slice it on her kitchen table, she noticed it was moving. She quickly reached for her smartphone, recorded a video of the creepy twitching meat and posted it online. The minute-long clip was viewed tens of millions of times on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter and eventually found its way onto Western websites, where it went viral again.

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Believe it or not, the world’s most expensive cheese doesn’t come from cows or goats, but from donkeys. Made on a farm in Serbia, ‘Pule Cheese’ is made from Balkan donkey milk and costs a hefty $1,000 per pound! It is a crumbly white cheese, apparently popular for its intense flavor and natural saltiness.

The world’s supply of pule comes from a single herd of Balkan donkeys that live on a farm in the Zasavica Special Nature Preserve, Serbia. Part of the reason this cheese is so expensive is that donkeys don’t yield too much milk, and they all have to be milked by hand, three times a day. Apparently, 15 donkeys yield about a gallon of milk, and it takes 3.5 gallons to make a pound of pule cheese. The donkeys of the Zasavica Special Nature Preserve only produce enough milk to make around 200 pounds of pule cheese a year, which makes it very hard to come by.

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Due to inconveniences caused to the Andersen family, we have decided to remove this article, but you can still read their story on Zero Carb Zen.

Inspired by the growing trend of photographing your food and sharing the photos online before tucking in, a Tel Aviv restaurant has launched a special program that allows patrons to take the best food photos possible. Called “Foodography”, the unique concept relies on color-coordinated dishes, perfect lighting and custom-designed plates that either spin around to offer different photo angles, or come with a smartphone holder, to make the photos worth sharing on sites like Instagram or Pinterest.

“We wanted to reconnect with a new generation of customers – youngsters who connect with food through the lens of a smartphone,” said a spokesman for Carmel Winery, the company that developed the concept along with Baumann Ber Rivnay advertising agency.

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Lots of people are into growing their own food these days, and it looks like restaurants are trying to catch up too. Hollywood restaurant ‘Tender Greens’, for instance, is filled with vertical gardens, and everything they grow is served on the menu!

“We’ve always been interested in growing on-site,” said Erik Oberholtzer, co-founder of the California-based fast food chain. “But all of our restaurants are in high-density urban areas, so aside from a few planter boxes we thought there was nothing beyond decorative that we could ever do.”

But when Erik and the other founders started researching vertical gardens, they came across the concept of aeroponic towers from Green City Farms. These towers are basically plant-filled poles that can easily blend in, pretty much anywhere. So they decided to get some for their Hollywood location.

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In a bid to deter rivals from stealing the affections of his pretty girlfriend, a Chinese man actually spent two years fattening her up!

You Pan, from southern China’s Guangdong Province, started dating Yan Tai a couple of years ago. She weighed only 98 pounds at the time and was quite attractive, a fact that made You Pan afraid other suitors might steal her away. Worried that he might lose her, the man masterminded a diabolical plan to make her unattractive to other men.

Over the course of two years, You Pan made sure that Yan Tai got plenty to eat – he treated her to big breakfasts and elaborate lunches and dinners. He even woke her up in the middle of the night to feed her snacks. Slowly, but surely, his plan worked – Yan Tai’s weight has almost doubled. She now weighs 196 pounds.

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35-year-old Debbie Taylor loves cooking big meals for her boyfriend and teenage son. But when the time comes to sit down at the table and dig in, she just pulls out a packet of Beef-flavored Monster Munch crisps instead. In fact, that’s about all she’s been eating for the past decade!

Debbie, a hotel chambermaid in Harlow, Essex, is so paranoid about food that she actually takes a packet of crisps when she goes out to restaurants, and munches on them while her boyfriend Gerald indulges in a traditional meal. She takes them everywhere. For example, when the boyfriend took her and her son Luke for a holiday in Spain, she actually packed a separate suitcase full of Monster Munch for the trip!

“I’m not a fan of the cooked meal,” she wrote in a life and style experience article in The Guardian a few years ago. “I’m much happier with Monster Munch crisps – beef flavor; I wouldn’t touch pickled onion. When I open the bag, I check if they have enough beef coating on them; if it’s not enough, I’ll throw them away.”

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24-year-old New Yorker Robert Lee is one of those rare souls who give up their high flying careers, and use their business acumen to make a difference in the world. Lee is the cofounder of ‘Rescuing Leftover Cuisine’ (RLC), an initiative that makes an effort to end urban hunger by collecting wasted food from large establishments and giving it away to the poor.

Lee said that his interest in food conservation comes from his Korean immigrant parents, who insisted on clean plates and taught him never to waste food. Subsequently, he spent his college years volunteering for New York group Two Birds, One Stone, delivering extra dining hall food to homeless shelters. It was during this time that Lee realised he could streamline the system into a scalable model.

Today, Lee and his fellow ‘rescuers’ at RLC march the streets of New York City, collecting paper bags of food from restaurants and cafés that are willing to donate what they would have otherwise thrown away. The team is able to collect anywhere between five and 120 pounds of food a day, and they promptly deliver the haul to a nearby homeless shelter.

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Thanks to Japanese company House Foods Group, tear-inducing onions could be a thing of the past! The company claims to have produced the world’s first ‘tear-free’ onion, by disabling the compounds that the popular vegetable releases when chopped.

According to a House Foods Group press release, their researchers have spent over a decade studying the chemistry of onions. In 2002 they published a study describing the biomechanical process of how chopping onions makes you cry, which won them them an Ig Nobel Prize – an award handed out to honor achievements organizers consider unintentionally funny.  In their paper, the scientists hypothesized that it would be possible to weaken the tear-inducing enzymes while maintaining the onion’s flavor and nutritional value.

And, in their recent announcement, House Foods Group claims to have turned the theory into a reality, by bombarding onion bulbs with irradiating ions which causes them to produce low amounts of enzymes. Apart from facilitating a completely tear-free chopping experience, the technique also makes the onion less pungent.

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If you found our post about bodybuilders consuming breast milk hard to stomach, wait till you hear what this woman in England puts in her smoothies. Kathryn Beale makes controversial birth placenta smoothies in her own kitchen and sells them to new mothers for £25 ($38) each.

The 41-year-old from Wiltshire county, in South West England, got involved in placentophagy – the consumption of birth placenta – a couple of years ago, after meeting the founder of the Independent Placenta Encapsulation Network. Her most popular product is a placenta capsule, priced at £150 ($224) per batch, but her most talked-about creation is a smoothie that contain a fist-sized chunk of chilled placenta blended with berries and bananas.

Kathryn insists that these products are perfectly safe and have several health benefits. “Most species of mammal eat their own placenta straight after birth, raw – it is normal in the animal kingdom,” she explained. “We are unusual in that we don’t routinely do it. It is full of iron, stem cells and hormones, and is reputed to help with milk production and post-natal depression.” The placenta products aren’t meant for everyone, though – just new mothers. “Women who want to use their placentas are tested during pregnancy, and if we know the placenta carries any blood-pathogens we will not use it,” she explained. “After the birth it then stays with the mum in cold bags with ice packs. I collect them very quickly, usually within 24 hours.”

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