Imagine if you could plunge a straw into a juice box, suck up the juice, and then eat the juice box. That's what Professor David A. Edwards has essentially created. The biomedical engineer and his team of Harvard brainacs have invented a membrane and shell made from charged polymer and food particles that could enclose food (or liquid) and be a biodegradable (and edible) substitute to plastic bottles.
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“The idea was to try to create a bottle which was based on how nature creates bottles,” Edwards said. The product, called WikiCells, can be peeled off or eaten.
So far, his lab has filled an orange membrane with orange juice, a tomato-flavored enclosure filled with gazpacho and even grape-sized packages filled with wine.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.