Our weekly serving of off-the-menu items – a few popular favorites from the week, as well as a few morsels that may have slipped your notice.
A Pretty Sweet House
French chocolatier Jean-Luc Decluzeau has crafted an 18-square meter cottage entirely from chocolate. The cottage, which uses 1.5 tons of chocolate, is currently on display at the Musee de Sevres in paris.Guests can even rent the cottage, which can accommodate up to 4 people at 50 euros per night.
Designing Dinner Based on DNA
There’s a new field of study emerging – nutrigenomics – and it wants to design your dinner. Companies like Nestlé are merging meal kits with DNA analysis and other nutrition-based technologies to devise meal systems perfectly customized for individuals. Although the future of nutrigenomics is still undecided, the industry expected to be worth at least $10 billion by 2023.
Potato Peel Packaging
Salty, crunchy french fries are one of the world’s most beloved snacks, but their production leaves behind potato peel waste. Devising a solution to the problem, Milan-based designers Simone Caronni, Pietro Gaeli, and Paolo Stefano Gentile transformed leftover potato peels into packaging for french fries. Their creation, Peel Savers, is 100% biodegradable, and can be re-purposed as animal food or fertilizer.
Although carrot pulp, a byproduct of juicing, is most often used as compost, engineering students at the Danish Technical University have turned the carrot waste into an alternative flour. Working with wholesale company Greens, they replaced 35% of regular all-purpose flour with carrot powder, successfully mimicking traditional flour’s properties while giving the carrot pulp a more high value use.
Champagne that’s Out of this World
Commissioned by Mumm champagne house, French designer Octave de Gaulle has invented a champagne bottle that can function in space. The new bottle will soon be tested on a zero-gravity plane, where consumers have to scoop the wine out of the air with their long-stemmed glasses.
