There’s a wacky new diet product sweeping Japan, and it’s modeled after Willy Wonka’s famous Everlasting Gobstopper. Aptly named the ‘60-Minute Candy’, it’s a lollipop with a three-centimeter ball of sugar that lasts for an entire hour!

The 60-minute-candy has gone viral in the Japanese Twitterverse, with hundreds of women passing it on as a great way to suppress sugar cravings. A gigantic lollipop doesn’t really pass for diet food, but a few licks of it apparently beat gorging on a candy bar, and since it lasts so long it’s also more affordable.  Well, because it’s long-lasting, it’s actually great to suppress cravings for foods with higher calories. And they’re so handy that people could carry them around and take them out from time to time for a good lick.

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We’ve heard people going on all sorts of crazy diets, but this one is a first – an American student recently went a 30-day bug fest! Throughout  the month of February, Alabama student Camren Brantley-Rios ate insect-laced meals three times a day.

The 21-year-old, who documented his bug-eating experience on a blog called ‘30 Days of Bugs’, believes that traditional meats such as pork and beef are unsustainable as sources of protein. He considers insects to be the diet of the future, so he’s experimenting with creepy crawly ingredients to make delicious dishes.

There was a time when Camren himself was repulsed by the idea of consuming insects. But now that he’s actually done it, he says it hasn’t been too difficult to get used to. “I’m mainly sticking to three species,” he said. “Mealworms, waxworms and crickets. Those are definitely the bulk of my diet. But I’m trying here and there to incorporate things a little bit more exotic.”

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If you’re looking for the finest dark chocolate money can buy, you might want to try , a delicate, handmade chocolate, made from the finest cacao beans Ecuador has to offer. At a hefty $260 per 1.5 ounce-bar, it is the most expensive chocolate in the world.

According to the makers of To’ak, 95 percent of the world’s chocolate is made from mass-produced beans, whereas they use rare cacao seeds harvested from the coast of Ecuador. These seeds are fermented and converted into liquid chocolate, which is then hand-moulded into bars. Each bar contains 81 percent cacao, and requires 36 different steps to create. Finally, a single, hand-selected, hand-measured, shelled cacao bean is placed in the center. The bean, measuring between 7 and 8 mm, has to fit perfectly.

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Developed by a Cambridge University affiliated laboratory, Esthechoc is being touted as the world’s first ‘beauty chocolate’. It’s a dark chocolate with 70 percent cocoa containing high levels of two powerful anti-oxidants which help reverse the skin’s natural ageing process.

A 7.5g piece of Esthechoc has as many cocoa flavanols as a 100g piece of regular chocolate, and the same amount of astaxanthin as 300g of wild salmon. These substances are believed to help improve blood circulation and increase blood supply to the skin, making it look healthier and younger. Cambridge-based bio-medical company Lycotec tested the chocolate on volunteers aged between 50 and 60, and recorded visible benefits in just three weeks.

“After 3-4 weeks of daily intake by 50-60 year old volunteers, the Beauty Chocolate was able to not only suppress markers of sub-clinical inflammatory damage in their blood, but also reverse their age-related depression of microcirculation and blood supply to such peripheral tissues as subcutaneous fat and skin,” Lycotec claims in a post on its website. “This consequently resulted in a significant boost of oxygen delivery to these tissues and restoration of their respiration – the essential physiological need in controlling and supporting skin health.”

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Only in Japan can you find strange foods like garlic flavored cola, deep-fried maple leaves, and delicious water cake, but citrus-scented eggs are pretty strange, even by its standards. And yet these fruit-smelling eggs do exist thanks to a producer in Kochi Prefecture, in the southwest corner of Shikoku island.

The special eggs, called ‘yuzu tama’, supposedly smell and taste like yuzu – one of Japan’s most loved citrus fruits. A yuzu looks like a wrinkly cross between a lemon and an orange and tastes like a combination of grapefruit and mandarin. It grows in abundance in Kochi and is used widely in Japanese cuisine.

Surprisingly, the yuzu tama don’t contain any chemical additives or flavorings. They are produced merely by feeding chickens copious amounts of yuzu peel, along with kale, non-GMO corn and sesame seeds. The resultant eggs don’t look very different from regular eggs, but they supposedly smell tantalizingly citrusy, even before they’re cracked open.

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A special type of caviar, made from rare albino fish eggs and laced with 22-carat gold, is thought to be the most expensive food on the planet. Priced at a staggering $300,000 per kilo (that’s about $40,000 per teaspoon), ‘White Gold’ caviar will be served to the super rich at some of the best restaurants in the world.

The powdery caviar, also called Strottarga Bianco, is the creation of Austrian fish farmer Walter Gruell, 51, and his son Patrick, 25. According to Patrick, the Strottarga Bianco comes from the white roe of the extremely rare albino sturgeon. To make just one kilo White Gold, the father-son duo use five kilos of caviar, which is then dehydrated. Older sturgeon are used because the eggs are apparently more elegant, smooth, spongier, aromatic, and they simply taste better.

The albino beluga that produces the special caviar originally lived in the Caspian Sea, but it is now almost extinct in its native environment, making it a rare delicacy. Another reason for the prohibitive price of White Gold is the age of albino belugas. While sturgeons usually live over 100 years, few belugas reach that age due to a genetic flaw that shortens their life.

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A couple of Australian men claim to possess the world’s oldest burger – a 20-year-old quarter pounder with cheese that still looks remarkably edible!

Eduard Neetz and Casey Dean purchased the burger from a McDonald’s outlet in Adelaide when they were 13 and 14 years old respectively. They were out buying food for a party, when they decided to pick up an extra burger for their friend Jono, who never showed up. “It started off as a joke, you know we told our friend we’d hold his burger for him but he never turned up and before we knew it six months had passed,” Casey said. “The months became years and now, 20 years later, it looks the same as the day we bought it, perfectly preserved in its original wrapping.”

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The Clink has recently been named the number one restaurant in Cardiff, Wales, by TripAdvisor, after getting more votes than all the other 945 restaurants in the Welsh capital. I know that doesn’t seem like the kind of news you normally read on OC, but The Clink isn’t your average restaurant – it’s staffed by inmates at HMP Cardiff, a Category D men’s prison!

Approximately 30 prisoners work a 40-hour week at The Clink, either in the kitchen or waiting tables, before returning to their cells at the end of each day. The restaurant also employs a team of trainers who work closely with the prisoners to come up with seasonal dishes made from locally sourced fresh ingredients. Some of the typical menu options include ‘venison and wild boar ragout with game sausage, chargrilled polenta and seasonal vegetables’ and ‘a celebration of rhubarb’.The inmates are paid £14 ($20) a week, but their biggest reward is the chance to turn their life around. Over time, the restaurant has managed to help reduce the reoffending rate of prisoners who worked there to 12.5 percent, compared to the national average of 47 percent.

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Pet owners sneaking a nibble or two out of their pets’ bowls, out of curiosity, is completely understandable. But eating dog food for a living? Now that’s pretty hard to digest!

But ‘professional dog food taster’ is a real job, and it apparently pays quite well. An entry level position in the quality department would typically pay about $30,000 a year, while an ‘experienced professional’ could draw up to $75,000.

So what exactly does the job entail? Well, as the name suggests, it pretty much involves tasting dog food to make sure it meets a premium brand’s exacting quality standards. Tasters regularly open sample tins of each freshly made batch of dog (or cat) food, and then proceed to smell it, and eat it.

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Whole wheat flour, spelt and water are the usual ingredients used to make bread, but add a touch of edible gold and you’ve got wealthy clients from all around the world stepping on each others’ toes trying to secure a loaf of the world’s most expensive bread. Made by Pan Piña bakery in the small Spanish village of Algatocin, the ‘gold leaf bread’ costs an unbelievable $150 per 400-gram loaf.

Pan Piña baker and co-owner Juan Manuel Moreno said that he came up with the idea for the bread after he saw the ‘world’s most expensive coffee’ on sale at another shop in the region. So he decided to dazzle up his own bread with a dash of edible gold worth over $100 both inside and on the surface of each loaf. However, he does agree that the shiny metal does nothing to enhance flavor.

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A vegan butcher shop sounds like an oxymoron, but believe it or not, such a venue is soon going to be operating in the US. Having surpassed their Kickstarter goal of $60,000, ‘The Herbivorous Butcher’ will be setting up shop in Minneapolis – bringing meat-free meat to vegans and vegetarians in the area. They’re going to be serving a host of meatless options, including ribs, bacon, chicken, sausage and more.

Siblings Aubry and Kale Walch are the brains behind Herbivorous Butcher. They have combined their vegetarian lifestyle with their Guamanian roots, and added touches from culinary cultures from around the world to create fake meats that have the texture and flavor of real red meats.

“We have carefully crafted 100% vegan, cruelty-free meat alternatives that capture the best flavors, textures, and nutrients that meats have to offer without their negative impacts on health, animals, and the environment,” they revealed. Some of the benefits of their products include – ‘small batch from scratch’, ‘hand-crafted’, ‘cholesterol free’, and ‘protein rich’.

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72-year-old Howard Helmer can produce a delicious gourmet omelette faster than anyone else in the world. Over the years, he’s managed to hang on to two Guinness World Records – one for the fastest omelette (in 39 seconds) and the other for turning out a whopping 427 omelettes in 30 minutes.

In every demonstrative video he makes, Helmer shares his secret – he mixes two eggs with two tablespoons of water, and fries them in a 10-inch omelette pan. His routine goes something like this: “Butter in the pan – two eggs and two tablespoons of water – bring the cooked egg to the center of the pan and tilt the pan so that the raw egg finds some base to cook on until there’s no more runny egg but the egg is still very moist on top. In goes some cheese, some spinach, fold the omelette in half, and then the whole thing goes upside down on your plate.”

Helmer’s association with eggs actually began 42 years ago, when he took up a job at the American Egg Board, writing copy about the wonders of chicken eggs. Since then, he has promoted eggs at country fairs, restaurant conventions, culinary schools, and on national television. Over the years, he’s also worked with famous chefs and taught movie stars to make omelettes.

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Israeli artist Maor Zabar’s creations look deceptively delicious, but they are meant to be worn not devoured. He uses felt, plastic and wire to create incredibly realistic models of delicious dishes and incorporates them into fashionable headgear. Some of his clever designs include a berry pie beret, an outdoor picnic fascinator, and even a salad sombrero.

36-year-old Zabar began designing the hats a couple of years ago, when he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. “When I discovered I had Crohn’s disease, I was forced to start a special diet and was unable to eat many of the foods I have always loved,” he revealed. “So instead of eating them, I created them out of felt and fibers and made them into beautiful fascinators.” And although he’s cured of his illness now, he still loves adding new designs to his Food Hat Collection.

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A couple of Belgian designers have come up with a new range of edible food containers that are eco-friendly, taste good, and most importantly, save people from the misery of doing dishes.

The young entrepreneurs – Helene Hoyois and Thibaut Gilquin – got the idea after hosting a party one night, after which they found themselves facing a mountain of dirty dishes to that needed cleaning. Instinctively, Thibaut turned to Helene and asked: “And if we eat the dishes?”

He was only joking at first, but the duo soon started to take the idea seriously. After a few trials, they finally managed to come up with a viable concept – containers made from a combination of potato starch, water and oil. The material is tough enough to retain all sorts of foods and sauces, but is also easily digestible.

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An extraordinary plant that produces both tomatoes and potatoes has been developed in the UK. Just one of these bad boys can grow more than 500 sweet cherry tomatoes above the ground, and a decent crop of white potatoes below. Aptly named ‘TomTato’, the plant is actually 100 percent natural, and not genetically modified as one would expect.

TomTato, a.k.a ‘veg plot in a pot’, was developed through high-tech grafting by Thompson and Morgan, a horticultural firm based in the town of Ipswich, in Suffolk, England. Although similar plants have been created in the UK before, this is the first time someone has managed to produce a commercially viable version.

According to Guy Barter of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), taste was a real problem with past varieties, but the TomTato seems to have hit the jackpot.

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